NTERNATIONAL

PRACTICE THEORY
SECOND EDITION

CHRISTIAN BUEGER AND FRANK GADINGER

International Practice Theory
 Christian Bueger • Frank Gadinger

International Practice
Theory
Second Edition

Christian Bueger
Department of Politics and
International Relations
Cardiff University
Cardiff, UK Frank Gadinger
Centre for Global Cooperation
Research
University of Duisburg-Essen
Duisburg, Germany
ISBN 978-3-319-73349-4 ISBN 978-3-319-73350-0 (eBook)
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, 2ND EDITION

Since the first edition of International Practice Theory was written, the
practice theoretical debate in international relations has matured signifi-
cantly. It seemed reasonable to drop the “new perspectives” sub-title,
con- sidering that practice theory is now a well-established perspective.
What sparked our ambition for this significantly revised and extended
edition was, firstly, to include many of the great practice theoretical
works published in the last years. New answers to the challenges we set out
in the first edition, such as questions of change and materiality, have
been pub- lished and require attention. We were, secondly, delighted to
see that the first edition was received as an accessible overview and
entrance point to the practice debate in international relations. In this
new version, we have aimed at living up to the promise of providing a
gateway to practice by further adding clarity and elaborating more fully
on some of the intricate theoretical and practical challenges of
international practice theory.
Some of the original concerns of the first edition remain. Fortunately,
the international practice theory debate has not been narrowed down to
one version of practice theory, but has instead become more pluralistic in
recent years. It remains an important goal of the book to open up the
debate and seek connections between practice theories within international
relations, as well as, importantly, beyond it. Ensuring a fruitful dialogue
with our neigh- boring disciplines of sociology, science studies,
anthropology, international law, or geography is of continued
importance. Articulating the differences between practice theoretical
accounts more clearly and discussing them as useful tools in empirical
analysis is another ongoing concern. Further efforts in exploring the
relations to other ways of doing IR are required, whether

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, 2ND EDITION

the traditional rationalist or constructivist approaches, or the wide range

of other turns, such as the discursive, aesthetic, visual, pragmatic, or
performa- tive turn that have influenced theorising lately. Last but not
least, in this second edition we emphasise our understanding of practice
theory as a methodological orientation to an even greater extent. What
we hope to enable with this book is not theoretical debate, but thick
praxiographies of the international, producing stories of what
international practices are.
The juggling symbol on this 2nd edition’s cover represents many of
the core concerns of the book. Juggling is an ancient practice that lives on
in today’s era of computer games. It is a physical skill that requires
objects as well as practical experience. While it is a good example of a
practice, it also represents the concerns of practice theory. In the
metaphorical sense, jug- gling implies coping with and balancing several
activities at the same time, or organising an object in a certain manner.
Moreover, juggling points to the creative and playful character of many
activities in our everyday lives. The practice theoretical work we discuss
in this book is juggled and moves with vocabulary, ontology, research
tools and actual practices, while emphasising the importance of creative
research.
Several people helped us in producing the second edition. People with
whom we had extended discussions about the first edition in part or
whole include Emanuel Adler, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Claudia Aradau, Pol
Bargués Pedreny, Niklas Bremberg, Alena Drieschova, Alejandro
Esguerra, Katja Freistein, Nina Graeger, Gunther Hellmann, Ted Hopf, Jef
Huysmans, Jonathan Joseph, Friedrich Kratochwil, Milja Kurki, Jorg
Kustermans, Merje Kuus, Max Lesch, Daniel Nexon, Holger Niemann,
Vincent Pouliot, Hilmar Schaefer, Sebastian Schindler, Klaus Schlichte,
Christopher Smith, Jan Stockbruegger, Peter Sutch, William Walters,
Tobias Wille, Antje Wiener, Dvora Yanow, and Taylan Yildiz. We are
grateful for their advice and suggestions. We like to further thank Daniel
Orders for his superb edi- torial and stylistic work, Elena Simon for
brilliant editorial assistance, and Sarah Roughley from Palgrave
Macmillan for supporting the project and instantly recognising the
importance of a second edition.
Christian Bueger acknowledges the support of the research leave
scheme of Cardiff University that facilitated the writing up of the manu-
script. He further thanks the University of Seychelles, where parts of the
book were written.
Frank Gadinger wishes to thank colleagues and fellows at the Centre
for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen, for
continuing to provide him with an inspiring work environment while
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, 2ND EDITION
vii
writing this manuscript. He would also like to express his gratitude to
his wife, Anna, for her unwavering support and encouragement during
the preparation of this book.
Parts of Chap. 2 draw on Bueger, Christian and Frank Gadinger. 2015.
The Play of International Practice, International Studies Quarterly 59(3):
449–460.
Cape Town and Duisburg, November 2017
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, 1ST EDITION

This book is the outcome of an intellectual journey that brought us to

different places and led us to discover thinkers across disciplines.
Various conversations have shaped our thinking about what practice
theory is and what we can do with it in International Relations (IR). The
first ideas for writing this book emerged from a discussion in a corner
bar in the suburbs of Florence. Back then, both of us were fascinated by
the alternative uni- verse that contemporary social theory provides to
understand interna- tional politics, especially if compared to the narrow
spectrum that classical IR theory has on offer. However, when first
embarking on this intellectual quest, we occasionally thought we were
heading in diverging directions by thinking about different problems
such as materiality, practical knowl- edge, reflexivity, justification or
narrativity and in discovering new authors from other disciplinary
contexts. Ultimately we always noticed that the sometimes hidden
intellectual spirit behind our search was the priority of practice in social
life. “Practice theory” in IR has seen a similar evolution to our own
experience. What was once a sort of intellectual stranger is now seen
increasingly as a familiar body of thought whose core insights are of
immediate relevance for the discipline. It is our impression that the
connections that the idea of centering theory in practice provides are,
however, still underestimated. With this book we hope to be able to
make some of these connections more visible and indeed also more
plausible. Often we find that researchers prefer to develop niches, in
arguing for the superiority of this or that perspective – whether it is
Bourdieusan praxeol- ogy, Actor-Network Theory, Relationalism or
Narrative theory – rather than elaborating on the grander picture. While
our interpretation of what

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, 1ST EDITION

practice theory is, or perhaps should be, is, of course, also restrictive, the
goal of this book is to outline how perspectives hang together, and how a
set of common challenges – whether ontological or methodological –
exists. These challenges provide a common ground, and are an invitation
to appreciate the tensions between different theoretical perspectives and
positions. At the same time we hope that this book also provides an intel-
ligible introduction for those new to practice theoretical thought. Our
goal is to make the core assumptions and insights from international
prac- tice theory accessible and provide guidance of how to pursue a
practice- theoretical research project. Finally, with this book we hope to
spark more dialogue between IR, and the different disciplines concerned
about prac- tice, including, but not limited to, sociology, cultural studies,
policy stud- ies, organization studies or anthropology.
Conversations with a range of individuals have been instrumental in writ-
ing this book. We had the pleasure to talk over different aspects reflected in
the book in discussions with Emanuel Adler, Morten Skumsrud
Andersen, Trine Villumsen Berling, Richard Freeman, Inanna Hamati-
Ataya, Gunther Hellmann, Friedrich Kratochwil, Xymena Kurowska, Jorg
Kustermans, Anna Leander, Maximilian Mayer, Christian Meyer, Iver
Neumann, Vincent Pouliot, Peer Schouten, Ole Jacob Sending, Peter Sutch,
Hendrik Wagenaar, William Walters, Dvora Yanow, and Taylan Yildiz.
Felix Bethke, Elisa Wynn- Hughes, Holger Niemann and Sebastian
Jarzebski have provided detailed comments on parts of the manuscript. We
are grateful to Christopher Smith and Jan Stockbruegger not only for
research assistance, but also for provid- ing detailed comments on the
entire manuscript.
Christian Bueger acknowledges the support from the Centre for
Advanced Security Theory, Copenhagen University where parts of this
manuscript were written. Writing up moreover benefitted from the sup-
port by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/K008358/1] and
the Department of Politics and International Relations, Cardiff
University. Frank Gadinger would like to thank his colleagues and
fellows at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University of
Duisburg-Essen, for providing him with a stimulating work environment
and rich discus-
sions while writing this manuscript.
Parts of Chaps. 5 and 6 draw on Bueger, Christian, Pathways to
Practice: Praxiography and International Politics, European Political
Science Review 6(3), 383–406, 2014
Cardiff and Dü sseldorf, August 2014
 CONTENTS

1 Introducing International Practice Theory 1

2 Situating Practice in Social Theory

and International Relations 13

3 Approaches in International Practice Theory I 35

4 Approaches in International Practice Theory II 69

5 Conceptual Challenges of International Practice Theory 99

6 Doing Praxiography: Research Strategies, Methods

and Techniques 131

7 Conclusion: Completing the Practice Turn 163

Literature 177

Index 207

xi
 LIST OF TAbLES

Table 2.1 Map of the social theory landscape 20

Table 2.2 Overview of main approaches in IPT 31
Table 6.1 Starting points and sensitizing frameworks 142
Table 6.2 Praxiographic techniques 154

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introducing International Practice Theory

Matt Sweetwood from Liberty, in the US state of Missouri, fell in love

with a German girl he met at university. He followed her to Germany,
where they are now happily married and living with three sons in Potsdam.
Sweetwood has lived in Germany for over ten years, but the country’s
peo- ple and their culture remain something of a mystery to him.
Professionally, he writes, directs and edits documentary films. In his most
recent feature, he set out to discover the essence of the German people.
He decided that the key to German identity lies in understanding one of
its best-known cultural assets: beer. For his documentary Beerland, he
spent months trav- elling around, visiting breweries, drinking clubs, and
ordinary taverns. He found that Germans can be serious and silly, tradition-
bound and visionary, all at once.
The idea that we might be able to understand the German people by
studying and experiencing one of their most recognisable habits and cul-
tural goods – drinking beer – seems intuitive; anyone who has had the
opportunity to spend an evening at a German tavern will understand this
immediately. What appears obvious for a documentary maker or the every-
day traveller seems to be of limited value when we seek to understand
world politics, however. Although international relations (IR) theory is also
concerned with national identities, we are nonetheless advised to look else-
where when studying the discipline. ‘Go and study the speeches of
famous politicians!’, we are told. ‘Examine national interests!’ or
‘calculate power and balancing behaviour!’ are just some of the
conventional guidelines that

© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Bueger, F. Gadinger, International Practice
Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-
73350-0_1
2 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

any student of IR will be familiar with. And yet, is there anything we may
learn from Sweetwood’s eye-opening quest? Can the account of a docu-
mentary filmmaker suggest new directions for IR scholars?
Whilst working at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iver
Neumann faced a similar problem to Sweetwood. How does one come to
understand what the work of a diplomat actually involves? Hardly
anyone had written about what these mandarins do when they
undertake their métier. And yet, wasn’t it obvious that IR should be able
to say something about what diplomats do?
Searching for an argument that would be intelligible for IR
researchers, Neumann (2002) introduced a body of thought that he
described as ‘practice theory’ in a 2002 article. He declared it to be vital
that IR return to studying the doing and sayings of those involved in
world politics. Neumann was certainly not the first to highlight the
importance of turn- ing to practice; indeed, earlier generations of IR
scholars had already pro- posed that practice should be a core category
in IR theory. His article sparked interest in giving centre stage to the
concept of practice, however, as well as rethinking how it may be
theorised and studied empirically.
Neumann was not on his own. A broad movement of scholars from
across the social sciences had started to think about practice and how the
investigation of doing and sayings can provide us with a better
understand- ing of the world. Together, these scholars suggest that the
attention to prac- tice requires a ‘turn’; that is, a practice turn. This
metaphor suggests that practice theory is not merely a new theory, but
involves substantial shifts in thinking about the world and the nature and
purpose of social science.
What, then, does it mean to study international relations through the
lens of practice? Scholars focusing on practices as a core unit of analysis do
not want to begin with fixed assumptions of what people are like, how
they behave or what logic they follow. Nor do they start with claims
about the nature of the international system or of global politics. Instead,
they consider an account that starts by paying attention to what actors
do and say, and how these activities are embedded in broader contexts.
They ask what knowledge is required to perform world politics, and how
actors work together to make the international. They attempt to pay
attention to the things and technologies used in producing the
international. To focus on practices is also an attempt to break with
some traditional assumptions and distinctions of ‘level of analysis’
usually taught in intro- ductory IR courses. Practice theorists argue that
many of our traditionally learned dichotomies are more of a hindrance
than a help. These include
 INTRODUCING INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY 3

the division between agency and structure, micro and macro, subject and
object, individual and society, mind and body or the ideational and the
material.
How then, may we conduct meaningful research if these are
unproduc- tive assumptions? Does practice theory seek to throw all
received wisdom overboard?
Both Matt Sweetwood and Iver Neumann naturally began their
investi- gations with background knowledge of their ‘cases’. They had
clear objec- tives: Sweetwood wanted to understand German identity,
while Neumann addressed diplomacy. Sweetwood prepared for his
movie in reading about the historical evolution of beer as a cultural aspect
of German life. Neumann relied on literature on diplomacy in world
politics, for instance, Ernest Satow’s Guide to Diplomatic Practice, widely
regarded as the authoritative text in the world’s foreign ministries
(Neumann 2012: 1–3).
Satow defines diplomacy as “the conduct of official relations between
the governments of independent states” (quoted after Neumann 2012:
1). Yet, for Neumann, definitional or theoretical knowledge was not
sufficient in understanding how diplomacy works. Sweetwood dealt with
the same problem; the cultural history of Germany provided him with an
overview of the range of national brewing and beer drinking traditions,
but it did not lead him to a richer understanding of German culture as
lived experi- ence, and told him little about how to understand the
German people.
Sweetwood and Neumann recognised that to understand their
objects, books were not enough. Rather than trying to be ‘objective’ and
‘distant’ observers, they had to engage with their objects of investigation.
This required not only observing practices, but also learning, adapting
and becoming active. Sweetwood not only learned how to drink beer, he
also studied in a small brewery in Bavaria. Through this experience, he
began, for instance, to understand why an established family tradition of
indepen- dence may be stronger than the drive for profit by contracting
out to a major company. The survival of small independent breweries over
several decades was an issue that had puzzled Sweetwood, since he was
used to the monopolised US beer market.
Neumann, meanwhile, became a diplomat, working for the foreign
ministry. Through this experience, he learned, for instance, that writing a
diplomatic speech is not an isolated action of one individual thinker, fol-
lowed by forwarding the piece to a higher political level. Instead, it is a
group undertaking that involves talking with different individuals and
slowly finding a common thread through bureaucratic procedures and
4 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

routines. Practice theory involves observing the practices of others, talking

about these practices, participating in and reflecting upon them all at
once. The aim is not to reduce and present abstract explanations of social
phe- nomena, but to come to a deeper understanding of how the world
works in and through practices.
If ‘practice theory’ has only recently been introduced to IR, the con-
cept of ‘practice’ is certainly nothing novel. The term ‘practice’ is part of
everyday language and is used colloquially in IR. Often, practice is also
contrasted with theory. In this case, by practice, we mean what ‘normal’
people are doing, and by ‘theory’ we refer to abstract generalisations – or
what academics are doing. The notion of ‘practice theory’ breaks down
this separation, and indeed argues that practice and theory are intrinsically
linked: Without practice there can be no theory, and vice versa. We will
come back to the relation between practice and theory, and how
‘practice theory’ forges new recombinations more substantially when we
discuss the methodology of practices later in the book (Chap. 6).
Practice was also being developed as a distinct concept long before
the conversation on practice theory began in IR. Advanced
understandings of practice began to emerge in the early 1990s with the
introduction of con- structivist thoughts. Many of the early constructivist
works drew substan- tially on authors we describe today as practice
theorists. For instance, in the so-called agency-structure debate of the
1990s, Anthony Giddens’ ‘structuration theory’ became influential. In
this debate, ‘practice’ was identified as an important intermediary of
agents and structures (Doty 1997). In these earlier proposals, ‘practice’
did not take centre stage, how- ever. It was primarily a supporting
concept, and remained only weakly conceptualised. Practice theory is
quite different in this regard; here the concept of practice is promoted
from a supporting function to the lead role. We provide a more detailed
discussion of the history of the concept of practice in IR in Chap. 2.
Over the past decade, practice theory has become increasingly promi-
nent in IR. In this book, we describe this endeavour as the common proj-
ect of international practice theory. We will explain and expand what we
mean by this expression and what it implies for IR over the chapters that
follow. We will in particular explore a range of distinct approaches to inter-
national practice theory (Chaps. 3 and 4), but also the conceptual chal-
lenges they face (Chap. 5). Given the rise and extent of the international
practice theory project, we think it deserves an acronym. Throughout the
book we refer to IPT.1
 INTRODUCING INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY 5

IPT comes with a range of promises. These include the potential for
getting closer to the actions and lifeworlds of the practitioners who per-
form international relations, to producing knowledge that is of relevance
beyond an intimate group of peers and may even address societal concerns
or contribute to crafting better policies, avoiding and overcoming (tradi-
tional) dualisms, such as structure and agency, developing a perspective
that is receptive to change as well as reproduction, to more fully
integrat- ing material aspects, ranging from bodily movements to objects
and arte- facts. These promises and prospects require detailed attention,
and in our conclusion, we assess how far IPT has already lived up to
them.
To understand the unique character of IPT, it is important to gain
a sense of the kind of empirical phenomena and issues scholars aim to
address. What IR scholars are interested in differs from other disciplines.
Although in no way limited to them, four issue areas have been particularly
important in the discussion of IPT, namely, diplomacy, the production of
insecurity, transnational governance, and state building and
intervention. Asked what the core practices of global politics are, many
answer by pointing to diplomacy. The study of bilateral and multilateral
diplomatic practices has become one of the most crucial issue areas
where practice theory was developed. Two of the first major studies
in IPT were con- cerned with understanding diplomatic practices
(Neumann 2002, 2005, 2012; Pouliot 2008, 2010b). Understanding
diplomatic culture and actions continues to be one of the main fields of
investigation, with a rich number of studies on diplomatic practices
having been published recently
(e.g. Pouliot and Cornut 2015; Sending et al. 2015).
A second issue area concerns the study of security and the production
of insecurity. In many ways, critical security studies has been one of the
innovators and drivers of IPT. Critical security studies’ core point was
that the meaning of security is not fixed, but socially produced and as
such inherently political and contingent. Consequentially, scholars
investigate the practices through which security and insecurity are
produced (Balzaq et al. 2010; Bueger 2016). Influential studies such as
those by Bigo (2005), Huysmans (2006), or Berling (2012) draw on
practice theory and argue in favour of understanding security politics as
a field of practice con- stituted by the actions of experts who give
security meaning and identify threats, as well as devices such as
technology, algorithms, databases, and risk analysis tools.
The study of transnational and global governance processes is a third
major issue area. In the 1990s, IR addressed the question of which
6 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

actors other than states matter in global governance (Avant et al. 2010).
The emphasis soon shifted to the modes of governance, and today a sig-
nificant number of scholars study the diverse range of governing practices,
including, for instance, benchmarking (Fougner 2008; Porter 2012) or
quantification through indicators and statistics (Davis et al. 2012a, b).
Devices, such as documents or databases, and material activities ranging
from negotiating to calculating or filling out forms, have also become
the focus of such research (Walters 2002; Bueger 2011; Sending and
Neumann 2011). Practice theories therefore offer a renewed
understand- ing of what it means to govern, and of how authority is
distributed.
Finallys, state-building and peacebuilding is a field of international
activity that has increasingly been scrutinised from a practice-theoretical
viewpoint, accompanying the growth of interventions and peace opera-
tions since the 1990s. Practice theoretical studies were, on the one hand,
introduced to provide a better understanding of international activities
geared at building peace and reconstructing states. Scholars became
inter- ested in the everyday work of peacebuilding (Mac Ginty 2014) and
in conceptualising interventions as a rich and heterogeneous set of
practices (Olsson 2015). On the other hand, practice theoretical ideas
also allowed scholars to re-describe the situations that international
programs aim to respond to (Schouten 2013; Koddenbrock 2016).
Studies in these four issue areas were pivotal drivers in the development
of IPT. They provide the context and the ‘problematic situations’ for
which practice theory aims to develop responses. Over the course of this
book, we will come back to these issue areas and the above studies. We
introduce them here briefly, since we require some understanding of
what international practices are before we can set out to explore IPT.

1.1 CHaPTER OVERVIEW

To gather a better understanding of what international practice theory
consists of, we provide an initial approximation of practice theory and
what we can do with it in IR in Chap. 2, drawing on a range of strategies
to do so. Our first strategy is to provide a brief overview of how practice
theory has been introduced across the social sciences. This discussion
reveals that practice theory is a heterogeneous set of ideas and concepts;
to grasp this complexity, we introduce the metaphor of a ‘trading zone’.
This implies thinking about practice theory not as a cognitive construct,
but rather as an intellectual space in which scholars ‘trade’ ideas on how to
 INTRODUCING INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY 7

study practices and cooperate to further develop the project. The trading
zone gives us a basic metaphor to grasp the character of practice theory
as an intellectual project.
Our next strategy is to situate practice theoretical thinking in the wider
landscape of social theory and philosophy. We introduce a mapping tech-
nique that contrasts practice theory with other social theories, such as
ratio- nal choice, and with different expressions of culturalist theorising
such as discourse theory. Drawing on the work of Andreas Reckwitz, we
show how in ideal-typical form practice theory differs from cultural
theories that fore- ground either the mind and beliefs or discourses and
structures of meaning. This also grants us a map for understanding how
IPT relates to other theo- retical developments in IR, such as
constructivism. We gain a strong picture of how IPT is related to and
differs from other attempts to theorise interna- tional relations. Our third
and final strategy of introducing the basics of prac- tice theory is to move to
more positive and programmatic heuristic. We argue that practice theory
entails a number of commitments of how to think about and perform social
science, and about the core characteristics of international politics. We
summarise these commitments under the concepts of process, knowledge,
learning, materiality, multiplicity, performativity and empiricity. These
commitments can be interpreted in differing ways; we therefore need to
discuss how different practice theoretical approaches interpret and develop
them. This is a task we take up in the two following chapters.
In the Chaps. 3 and 4 we zoom in on distinct approaches of IPT. We
provide a detailed discussion of seven approaches, each of which provides
a distinct conceptual vocabulary and interpretation of the core premises
of practice theory. We discuss the origins of each approach, their core
concepts, and how they have been used in IR. Our focus is on approaches
that have already shown great promise in interpreting international politics
differently, and have attracted a significant range of scholars. These
approaches are, to some degree, the cornerstones of IPT, and together
they broadly document the different directions one can take. Our
intention is not to narrow down IPT to these seven approaches, since this
spectrum certainly does not cover the full spectrum of approaches.
Indeed, as we emphasise in the conclusion, other approaches are being
developed and used in IPT.

(1) We start with the praxeology of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieusian

research has been most directly associated with the label of practice
theory; his concepts are therefore an important reference point in
the debate. Beginning with early contributions by Ashley (1987)
8 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

and Guzzini (2000), Bourdieu’s praxeology has received signifi-

cant attention. Key concepts from Bourdieu – habitus, capital,
doxa, field – are used to study international practices of
diplomacy, security policy or political economy (Balzaq et al.
2010). The majority of Bourdieu-inspired studies investigate the
emergence of and power relations within transnational fields,
understood as social spaces constituted by practices in which actors
cooperate and compete (e.g. Berling 2012; Williams 2007).
Bourdieu’s praxeol- ogy has not only attracted considerable
attention as it provides the most elaborate (and indeed highly
complex) conceptual apparatus, but also because it intends to
bridge subjectivist and objectivist methodology.
(2) Michel Foucault’s concepts of governmentality, problematisation
and genealogy have inspired a broad range of studies on different
practices of governing and knowing the international. Although
Foucault’s body of work is often not directly associated with the
term practice theory, our discussion intends to correct this
misun- derstanding in arguing that Foucault is first and foremost a
practice theoretical thinker who, in particular, allows us to
conceptualise and study historical practices and configurations of
very wide scope. A wide range of technologies and practices have
been studied on the basis of Foucauldian vocabulary, meanwhile.
This includes works on benchmarking, statistics or indicators, with
strong empir- ical emphasis placed on global governance and the
diverse power effects of international organisations (Merlingen
2006; Fougner 2008; Jaeger 2010).
(3) We continue by discussing the concept of community of practice.
This approach originates in organisation studies, and was originally
developed by Etienne Wenger as a concept to study learning in
organisations. The framework was translated to IR by Emanuel
Adler (2005) and is a powerful device for rethinking various
forms of transnational communities. The community of practice
frame- work emphasises a social collective that shares a repertoire
of prac- tices and knowledge, and foregrounds processes of
learning practical knowledge. Adler principally used the
framework for revisiting security communities (Adler 2008),
though it is increas- ingly used to study other practice collectives
ranging from diplo- mats to pirates (Gilson 2009; Lachmann
2011; Bueger 2013a).
 INTRODUCING INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY 9

(4) Theodore Schatzki has provided a sophisticated practice theoretical

outline, and his definitions have become quite influential in the
debate. Although the use of his vocabulary in IR remains limited,
his approach deserves to be explored more fully. In particular,
Schatzki’s idea of practice as composed of performance and pro-
nouncements organised by practical understandings, rules and
teleo-affective structures, as well as his concept of arrangements,
are of interest. So far, Schatzki’s vocabulary has primarily been
employed by Cornelia Navari (2010) to lay out the English
School’s concept of international practice.
(5) We elaborate on an approach that puts emphasis on narrative as the
concept that binds together practice across time and space. This
approach is not directly associated with a single theorist, and we
discuss a broader range of authors together. Narratives can be
understood as configuration devices by which actors make sense of
the world and order it in particular ways. The focus becomes the
elements of narratives and how these are told and narrated in
par- ticular situations. Narrative approaches have become
particularly influential in the analysis of foreign policy (Devetak
2009; Krebs 2015a), as well as the study of peacebuilding and
post-conflict situ- ations (Buckley-Zistel 2014).
(6) Actor-network theory is our next approach. Developed in science
and technology studies, this approach foregrounds the practices
of making relations as well as the importance of non-human, or
mate- rial aspects. This approach represents, perhaps, a more radical
shift from conventional IR theories. Drawing on the works of
theorists such as Bruno Latour, John Law, or Michel Callon,
scholars emphasise performativity and contingency. For them,
international politics is a world continually in the making that
requires signifi- cant effort and maintenance work (Acuto and
Curtis 2013; Best and Walters 2013). Studies attempt to
disentangle the socio- technical networks that perform
international phenomena and knowledge in fields ranging from
international economy to climate change or security. They
investigate the effects of technologies, attempt to disentangle the
practical relations that produce world politics, or develop an
understanding of international politics as controversy between
different arrangements.
10 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

(7) The final approach we discuss is the pragmatic sociology initiated by

the work of Luc Boltanski. Like Schatzki’s work, the approach
holds significant potential for studying international practices, but
has not been widely employed to date. The focus of the approach
is on the study of controversies and the justifications that actors
provide. The approach is particularly interesting in the way that it
reclaims insights from the classical pragmatism of John Dewey and
others. Central themes such as creative capacity, situations of
controversy as moments of change, and the notion of order as the
outcome of everyday nego- tiations are taken up from
pragmatism and turned into empirical research approaches. The
first studies to have drawn on this approach in IR have focussed
on UN Security Council debates (Niemann 2015), US Congress
debates around the “war on terror” (Gadinger 2016), or global
health governance (Hanrieder 2016).

For each of these approaches, we provide an introduction to their core

ideas, main concepts, strengths and weaknesses, and discuss ways of using
them in IR. Together, they give us a theoretical repertoire for the study of
practice.
In the subsequent chapter, we ask what the relations between the
approaches are, and argue that the differences between them provide for a
range of productive tensions. Scholars take different positions on issues,
such as how contingent the world is, when and how practices and larger
constellations change, or how to conceptualise the varying scale of inter-
national practices. They also offer varying understandings of core concepts
in international relations and give differing perspectives on normativity
and the function of norms, the role of the materiality of a practice, and
conceptualisations of power.
Taken together, these questions point us to a range of challenges for
the development of practice theory. We elaborate on each of these, and
sketch out the various options to address them. These challenges, or
perhaps even puzzles, are principally philosophical in character, and
therefore there are no straightforward intellectual answers or even
‘optimal solutions’ to be presented. Instead, we suggest that these
puzzles should be taken as starting points for empirical research. In the
absence of actual practices, it makes little sense to discuss them at length
or to try to find solutions. This leads us to a range of methodological
reflections in the subsequent chapter: what are the modalities of initiating
a practice theoretical research project? Where does one start? What
methods are available?
 INTRODUCING INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY 11

Underlining the importance of more and better empirical research, we

discuss the methodology and methods of international practice theory in
Chap. 6, starting by outlining a number of methodological guidelines that
spring from practice theory, and the fact that undertaking social science
is a practice. We introduce the notion of praxiography to speak about the
methodology and methods of practice theory-driven research. In the
chapter, we discuss the status of ‘theory’ and why practice theory calls
for novel understandings of it, whether and how one can generalise with
prax- iography, as well as the significance of recursive and abductive
reasoning. There follows a discussion of where to anchor and start a
praxiography. We argue that the seven core approaches imply differing
research strategies and productive starting points. The largest part of the
chapter is, however, devoted to the discussion of concrete research
techniques (or methods).
Our argument is that praxiography implies carefully considering how
practice can be observed directly. Arguing against the conventional wis-
dom that international relations is not open to participant forms of field
work, we show how different forms of such work, including participant
observation, event observation and shadowing can be adopted in an IR
context. Some situations, for example the study of historical practices,
will nevertheless continue to require alternative techniques, and we
point to interviews and different forms of text analysis as options. We
provide a short sketch of each of these techniques, how they can be
employed in praxiography, and introduce some paradigmatic examples.
Together these techniques provide a rich repertoire for praxiography
that can be blended in various ways depending on the demands of the
phenomenon studied.
Our final section is concerned with the writing of a praxiography. This
is not only an issue that has received relatively sparse attention, but it is
also a challenging one. Writing about practice implies controlling for the
unruliness of practices, and ordering them into a more-or-less coherent
narrative. We argue that, firstly, we should also think about writing as a
practice, that is, as a particular practice that is not separate to producing
knowledge, but is a fundamental part of it. In practical terms we consider
writing about practices to be primarily about the problem of
intelligibility. How can a narrative about practice be written in a way that
makes sense to a distinct audience? We argue that praxiography requires
experimentation and creativity, and introduce ideas from ethnography
and filmmaking as inspirations.
Our concluding chapter attempts to zoom out. We ask whether IPT
has lived up to its promises, some of which are clearly on the way to be
12 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

realised, while others leave us with a more mixed evaluation. The

practice turn is far from being completed, but what will it imply as and
when that comes to pass? What will the status of practice theory be in
the future? We end by speculating about this future, and re-investigate
three scenarios originally outlined in the first edition of this book. Is IPT
becoming an ever-growing and thriving trading zone, a paradigm, or will
it soon begin to disappear into the annals of IR theory?

NOTE
1. We are aware that this acronym has attracted some criticism. Some might
think that there is not enough substance to grant international practice
the- ory an acronym, while others may point out that IPT is already
reserved for international political theory. We find the first critique
misleading; this book showcases how IPT has flourished. The latter concern
is, of course, valid, but we consider that the discipline can cope with having
the same acronym for two different intellectual fields.
 CHAPTER 2

Situating Practice in Social Theory

and International Relations

In 2001, Theodore Schatzki et al. (2001) published a seminal edited vol-

ume entitled The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. This book
became influential not only because it demonstrated the diversity of
prac- tice theoretical work already produced in different branches of the
social sciences, but also through introducing the idea that the new focus
on practices implied a ‘turn’, that is, a shift in how we think about and
under- take social sciences.
Across the social sciences, similar attempts have been made to argue for
a practice turn, attracting a growing number of scholars in a range of dis-
ciplines. Sociologists analyse organisation, learning and strategy-making
through the lens of practice (e.g. Miettinen et al. 2009; Nicolini 2013),
for example. What has become known as ‘strategy-as-practice’ research
is now a well-established approach in organisation studies, not least as
docu- mented by a handbook published on the subject (Golsorkhi et al.
2010). In other areas of sociology, researchers study, for example,
consump- tion behaviour through the lens of practice (e.g., Halkier et
al. 2011). In many ways, researchers in science and technology studies
have been at the forefront of the practice theoretical project (e.g.
Pickering 1992; Rouse 1996). Indeed, the majority of contributors to
the Practice Turn volume hailed from this branch of the social sciences.
The study of practice has also gained a strong foothold in policy studies,
and scholars draw on the concept to study the practices of policy
making and implementation (e.g.
Hajer and Wagenaar 2003a).

© The Author(s) 2018 13

C. Bueger, F. Gadinger, International Practice
Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-
73350-0_2
14 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Across these disciplines, and others such as history, geography, environ-

mental studies, gender studies or cultural sociology, the number of schol-
ars embracing the concept of practice and demonstrating its value has
been growing consistently; one finds an astonishing range of practices that
have been studied, whether it be cooking, cycling, running, driving, walk-
ing, negotiating, organising, writing, reading, or experimenting.
The metaphor of ‘turning’, while attractive for some, tends to be off-
putting for others, however. 1 Given the proliferation of so-called turns,
including the cultural, linguistic, material, performative or pictorial ones,
the appetite for them seems to have ebbed. However, referring to a prac-
tice turn remains a powerful reminder that the introduction of practice
theory implies more than the introduction of just a new theory or para-
digm. While practice theory develops new types of approaches and
frame- works, it also involves significant shifts in thinking about the world
and the nature and purpose of social science. These shifts involve
epistemology, ontology, methodology, methods, and indeed rethinking
how social sci- ence and IR relate to and are situated in the world.
In the following sections, we provide an approximation of practice
the- ory, and adopt three strategies to bring us closer to an
understanding of what practice theory is, and the commitments it
consists of. Firstly, we provide a brief review of the intellectual ancestors of
practice thinking, and argue for understanding IPT as a social space or a
trading zone in which various scholars exchange ideas and data.
Secondly, we draw on the work of German social theorist Andreas
Reckwitz to situate practice theoretical thinking in the wider landscape
of social theory and philosophy. We show how, in ideal-typical form,
practice theory differs from cultural theories that foreground either the
mind and beliefs or discourses and structures of meaning. We then discuss
how IPT relates to other theoretical develop- ments in IR, such as
constructivism, and finally, we outline the commit- ments implied by IPT
in terms of how to think about and undertake social science, and about
the core characteristics of international politics.

2.1 A FIRST APPROXIMATION: PRACTICE THEORY

AS A TRADING ZONE

Practice theories position themselves towards or in opposition to

numerous recent “paths of thinking, including intellectualism,
representationalism, indi- vidualism (e.g. rational choice theory,
methodological individualism, network analysis), structuralism, structure-
functionalism, systems theory, semiotics, and many strains of humanism
and poststructuralism” (Schatzki 2001: 2).
 SITUATING PRACTICE IN SOCIAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 15

In IR, practice theories have primarily been introduced by outlining differ-

ences with rationalism and various kinds of constructivism and post-
structur- alism. The intent is to show how core phenomena of IR,
including power, state behaviour, identity, international organisations,
transnational collectives, norms and rules, or war and peace can be studied
differently. IPT thereby makes decisive contributions to the study of
international relations and world politics across the sub-disciplinary issue
areas.
The opposition of practice theories to other approaches should not be
overemphasised, however. Differentiations are important for
introducing new ways of doing things, providing theoretical orientation,
and comply- ing with the expectations of a discipline that favours
contributions arguing for theoretical superiority, but if overstated, they
may easily lead to unpro- ductive dualisms and misunderstandings, and in
the worst case, to mutual ignorance. There is an ongoing risk that this
characterises the relation of practice theory to constructivism, post-
structuralism, feminism or post- colonialism. These perspectives,
pluralist in their own right, share many concerns with practice theories.
While differences need to be respectfully articulated, cultural turf wars
must be avoided.
Practice theories do not offer a unified approach; differing concerns,
types, forms of opposition to other approaches, and vocabularies are
clus- tered around the notion. A core of practice theories conceives of
practices as “embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity
centrally organised around shared practical understandings” (Schatzki
2001: 2). Differences arise among scholars over how to conceptualise
practical understandings, which additional supporting concepts are
required, how practices are interwoven or mediated by non-human
elements, machines and objects, or what the methodological
consequences of practice think- ing are. Some place stronger emphasis
on repetition and routinisation, such as the social theories of Anthony
Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, while others foreground fluid processes of
recurrent “situated accomplishments” structured through practices (cf.
Lynch 2001: 131) or describe practice as “infrastructure of repeated
interactional patterns” (Swidler 2001: 85). Large parts of the following
exploration of IPT aim at understanding these varieties and divergences,
and investigating why they matter when we study international
relations.
Coping with the diversity of practice theories implies taking a view on
how these perspectives manage to hang together. For the anthropologist
Sherry Ortner (1984), who was among the first to consider the notion of
practice theory, practice was no more than a ‘symbol’. As she put it,
‘prac- tice’ is “a new key symbol of theoretical orientation […]. This is
neither a
16 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

theory nor a method in itself, but rather, […] a symbol, in the name of
which a variety of theories and methods are being developed” (Ortner
1984: 127). Given the vast energy that has gone into defining consistent
practice approaches and the growing number of attempts to extrapolate
the differences between them, practice has certainly become more than a
symbol, however.
For others, practice theory is primarily unified by a shared intellectual
history. Miettinen et al. (2009), for instance, suggest speaking about a
“re-turn to practice”, given that current practice theory, to a large extent,
rediscovers understandings that have a de facto historical tradition.
Indeed, the concept of practice, or praxis, is anything but new. Richard
Bernstein (1971), whom Miettinen et al. (2009) allude to, lays out a his-
tory of the concept stretching from the Hegelian tradition and Karl
Marx’s outline of the idea of practice or ‘objective activity’ to the
American prag- matist philosophers Charles Pierce and John Dewey and
their notion of habit and actions. Joseph Dunne (1993) develops a
different history, which takes the Aristotelian concepts of different types of
practical knowl- edge – techne and phronesis – as a starting point. From
there, he explores thinkers such as R.G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt,
Hans Georg Gadamer and Jü rgen Habermas, for whom practical
knowledge was a crucial cate- gory. In other debates, a historical line is
drawn from the seminal works Time and Being by Martin Heidegger and
Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Schatzki 1996;
Stern 2003). These studies devel- oped accounts of the primacy of
practice in the making of the social world. Heidegger’s practice-based
ontology and Wittgenstein’s understanding that rules and meaning are
grounded in social practices moreover had a clear impact on current
practice approaches.
Another way of thinking about practice theory is to identify it as an
intellectual space. As historian Gabrielle Spiegel (2005b: 25) points out,
“the very looseness and theoretical incoherence [of practice theory], may
prove to be of […] benefit, carving out a space where the differential con-
cerns of a broad group of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and
philosophers can find a common space within which to address each
other”. A productive way to approach this space is through Peter
Galison’s (1997) concept of ‘trading zones’. Galison introduced the
notion to scru- tinise how scientists can cooperate and exchange results
and concepts, while simultaneously disagreeing on their general or
global meanings. In his words (1997: 46),
 SITUATING PRACTICE IN SOCIAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 17

subcultures trade. Anthropologists have extensively studied how different

groups, with radically different ways of dividing up the world and symboli-
cally organising its parts, can not only exchange goods but also depend
essentially on those trades. Within a certain cultural arena – what I called
[…] the ‘trading zones’ – two dissimilar groups can find common ground.
They can exchange fish for baskets, enforcing subtle equations of
correspon- dence between quantity, quality and type, and yet utterly
disagree on the broader (global) significance of the items exchanged.
Similarly, between the scientific subcultures of theory and experiment, or
even between different traditions of instrument making or different
subcultures of theorising, there can be exchanges (co-ordinations), worked
out in exquisite local detail, without global agreement.

The turn to international practice theory can be understood as such

an intellectual trading zone. It is a space bound together, not by fish or
bas- kets, but by a shared understanding of the value of studying
‘practice’. In this space, different (IR) practitioners meet and trade ideas
of how to conduct intelligible IR research relying on concepts of practice.
Whilst engaging in this exchange, IR practitioners may still continue to
funda- mentally disagree over the meaning of core concepts.
In an IR context, the work of Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot has
notably become associated with the label of practice theory. In a practice
theoretical manifesto and the introduction to an edited volume, (Adler
and Pouliot 2011a, b, c) they argue for a similar understanding to that of
a trading zone. They project practice theory as a joint enterprise that will
strengthen IR’s inner-disciplinary dialogue and allow researchers to over-
come any paradigmatic boundaries within the discipline. Adler and
Pouliot’s (2011a: 28) understanding submits that “taking international
practices seriously leads not to synthesis but to dialogue” and promises
“cross-fertilisation” between different IR theories. They describe the
modus of dialogue in the following way:

For example, realists can analyse the lifecycle of the balancing practice
from a material power perspective, while liberals can emphasise the
choices of institutions and individual choices. Alternatively, English School
scholars can emphasise the historical processes via which emerging practices
aggre- gate into social societies, while constructivists and poststructuralist
scholars may emphasise transformation in collective meanings and
discourse as a result of practice. (Adler and Pouliot 2011a: 28)
18 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Adler and Pouliot thus invite all students of IR “to approach world
politics through the lens of its manifold practices” (Adler and Pouliot
2011a: 1) and suggest that the notion of practice is a “focal point” that
makes “interparadigmatic conversations possible” (Adler and Pouliot
2011a: 3).
Our understanding of IPT as trading zone differs in two important
regards. Firstly, the very looseness and incoherence of the field of
interna- tional practice theory is its strength, not its weakness. Rather
than direct- ing efforts towards cross-fertilisation and agreement, the
exchanges and tensions between different practice approaches need to
be preserved. As Mol (2010a: 262) phrases it, the strength “is not in its
coherence and predictability, but in what at first sight, or in the eyes of
those who like their theories to be firm, might seem to be its weakness:
its adaptability and sensitivity.”
Secondly, not every IR theorist can be or should be considered as a
trader in the practice theoretical forum. In Adler and Pouliot’s initial out-
line, IPT is a project to which anyone can subscribe, independently from
theoretical positions. We disagree with Adler and Pouliot that it makes
sense to include all IR theories in the practice endeavour, however, and
doubt that a division of labour as sketched out in the above paragraph is
possible. Not every IR theorist is a practice theorist, can be a practice
theorist or is engaged in practice-oriented research; even many self-
proclaimed constructivists do not do practice theory.
There may be good reasons why someone does not want to be (or
should not be) an international practice theorist. The reason for this is
simple: many IR scholars, although writing about practice, do not share
the epistemological and ontological commitments that practice theories
imply, such as a performative understanding of the world, or an
understanding of science as one cultural domain among others. Sharing a
set of commitments is required to trade in the practice theoretical zone.
We come to these commitments at the end of this chapter.
Rather than turning practice theory into an overcrowded circus, the
ontological and epistemological commitments that give practice theory
its distinct value must be safeguarded to some degree. This is not an
isolationist argument, and does not imply that practice theorists cannot
(or should not) cooperate and converse productively with other
theorists and other trading zones of international relations, including
post- structuralism, discourse theory or the many varieties of
constructivism. Very much to the contrary: such cooperation,
collaboration and dialogue,
 SITUATING PRACTICE IN SOCIAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 19

notably in empirical work, is very promising. The precondition for such

cooperation is, however, a clearly laid-out set of commitments.
Understanding practice theory as a trading zone also implies taking
trans-disciplinary trade and exchange seriously. Research in other disci-
plinary contexts is often much more relevant to IPT than the contents of
many ‘must-read’ IR journals. Indeed, the practice theoretical
programme is in large part about making such trans-disciplinary
connections; whether it be with organisational sociology, social theory,
science and technology studies, geography, anthropology or policy
studies, IPT benefits from trans-disciplinary conversations. These
disciplines have much to contrib- ute to understanding international
politics, though the empirical material they deal with may at times be
unfamiliar. The challenges of conceptualis- ing practice and conducting
empirical research on that basis provide com- mon problems across
disciplines, however. As we will elaborate upon during a discussion of
the core approaches to IPT, many of these under- standings have been
developed through exchange with other disciplines.
Before proceeding further, we require a better understanding of what
practice theory is and how it can be situated in the grand landscape of
theoretical reasoning. The trading zone gives us a basic metaphor with
which to grasp the character of practice theory as an intellectual project.
Our next step is to situate practice theoretical thinking in the wider land-
scape of social theory and philosophy. In the next section, we contrast
practice theory with other social theories, such as rational choice, and
with different expressions of culturalist theorising, such as discourse
theory. Drawing on the work of Andreas Reckwitz, we show how in
ideal-typical form practice theory differs from cultural theories that fore-
ground either the mind and beliefs or discourses and structures of mean-
ing. This moreover grants us a map for understanding how IPT relates
to other theoretical developments in IR, such as constructivism, a dis-
cussion that we take up in the following section. Overall, we gain a clear
picture of how IPT is related to, and differs from, other attempts to
theorise international relations.

2.2 PRACTICE THEORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

For Andreas Reckwitz, practice theories represent a “family” of theory.
Using this metaphor, he points to Wittgenstein’s concept of family
resem- blance, defining similarities through relations. To better outline this
family, Reckwitz mapped out the social theoretical landscape.
20 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

The table below presents the core distinctions and categories of this
map. Reckwitz (2002, 2004a) firstly argues that social theory can be cat-
egorised according to three ideal types (Reckwitz 2002: 245–246): ratio-
nalism, norm-orientation, and cultural theory. Secondly, he suggests that
practice theory falls in the realm of cultural theory, and therein can be
differentiated from what he calls mentalism and textualism. The
intention of this mapping is to provide orientation to better navigate the
jungle of social theories, and therein position practice theory.
As summarised in Table 2.1, Reckwitz (2002, 2004a) suggests that
three different types of theorising prevail in social theory, each of which
suggest different central elements of meaning and develop quite distinct
explanations for behaviour. Rationalist theories are based on
methodolog- ical individualism, taking the individual as the most basic
unit. These individuals are conceived of as acting in accordance with
their own self- interest, guided by subjective forms of rationality and
cost-benefit calcula- tions. Given the focus on calculations, this actor type
has been described as homo oeconomicus. From the perspective of
rationalism, the world of homo oeconomicus is mainly composed of
individual actions (Reckwitz 2002: 245); actors are driven by interests
and the individual beliefs by which these interests become formulated.
Norm-oriented theories, Reckwitz’s second category, place more impor-
tance on social relations. For such theories, the social primarily consists
of normative rules. These rules designate what kind of action is possible at
all; that is, they allow actors to identify what behaviour is allowed or
prohibited,

Table 2.1 Map of the social theory landscape

Central elements of meaning Behaviour as an explanatory
problem

Rationalism Interests and beliefs Individual actions

Homo oeconomicus
Norm-oriented Normative order Intersubjective coordination
theories of action
Homo sociologicus
Culturalist theories Collective orders of knowledge Repetitive patterns of action
Mentalism Cognition, mind
Textualism Discourse, structures of meaning,
symbol systems
Practice theory Practices

Adopted and revised from Reckwitz (2004a: 318)

 SITUATING PRACTICE IN SOCIAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 21

legitimate or illegitimate, and worthwhile or worthless (Reckwitz 2002:

245). Actors consent to a normative order that consists of these rules;
con- sequently, this actor type has been described as homo sociologicus.
Norm- oriented theories tend to understand the social world by focusing
on the intersubjective coordination of potentially contradicting actions of
diverse actors. How can a constant clash of opposing interests be
avoided? Norm- oriented theories answer this question by pointing to
the creation and acceptance of normative expectations and roles. Such
theories then add another dimension; the world is comprised of more
than individuals and their rationalities.
Reckwitz’s third and final category of culturalist theorising makes a
similar move in that it foregrounds the importance of collectivity. There
is a fundamental difference, however. Homo oeconomicus and homo
sociologi- cus both dismiss “the implicit, tacit or unconscious layer of
knowledge which enables a symbolic organisation of reality” (Reckwitz
2002: 246). Culturalist theorising adds an additional layer that is
concerned with the driving forces behind actors’ conception of how the
world is ordered, and what enables them to act to begin with. The ability
to understand that the world is ordered assumes that there is an
established set of symbolic and meaningful rules in the form of culture;
as such, culture is the domain that gives meaning to actions and objects,
and provides the means with which to make sense of them (Reckwitz
2002: 246).
Culturalist theorising addresses questions of underlying social order
that often go unnoticed in the two other types: Rationalist perspectives
tend to gloss over broader questions of social order by reducing them to
an issue of unequal distribution of resources and tend not to address col-
lective patterns of action. Through a focus on shared norms, norm-based
theorising is better situated to understand the complexity of collective
actions and ensuing change. The assumption is that actors are driven by
norms, and the focus then turns towards examining how and why a certain
social order came to be. Such theories, however, often fail to offer
explana- tions of how these norms appear and are established.
Culturalist theorising differs on this point: the core idea is that the
pat- terns that structure action in the world are the result of common
orders of meanings, cues, symbols, and knowledge that function as rules
for action. Culturalist theories therefore aim at studying repetitive patterns
of actions by understanding collective orders of meaning and how reality
becomes organised by symbols and knowledge (Reckwitz 2002: 246–
247).
22 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Reckwitz maps out three directions that culturalist theorising can

take, distinguishing between mentalism, textualism and theories of
practice. If these strands of culturalist theorising agree on the
importance of a focus on shared orders of knowledge, they diverge on
where this knowledge is situated. In mentalism, shared orders of
knowledge are conceptualised as being processed in the human mind,
while culture is conceived of as a cognitive phenomenon residing
therein (Reckwitz 2002: 247). The main objects of analysis are shared
cognitive-mental schemes, and these are seen as the smallest unit of
analysis. Reckwitz (2002: 247) points to theorists and concepts such as
Max Weber and his notion of Weltbilder (world images), French
structuralism as developed by thinkers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and
Ferdinand de Saussure, and the phenomenol- ogy of Edmund Husserl
and Alfred Schü tz as representative of such an understanding.
Textualists go in the opposite direction. Instead of looking inside the
mind, they focus on the ‘outside’ and attempt to identify culture in dis-
courses, structures of meaning, texts or communication (Reckwitz 2002:
248). Reckwitz here refers to a tradition comprised of poststructuralism,
constructivist system theory, radical hermeneutics, or semiotics as concep-
tualised by theorists such as Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, Jacques
Derrida, Niklas Luhmann, Paul Ricœur and Roland Barthes. Despite con-
siderable conceptual differences, these culturalist theorists emphasise
extra-subjective structures of meaning, attempting to understand collec-
tive knowledge through shared social procedures and cultural codes. For
Reckwitz, Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures or Foucault’s
Archeology of Knowledge are prime examples of such work.
Reckwitz then situates practice theory by contrasting it with these
two ideal types. For practice theorists, it is in practice that one needs to
identify collective knowledge. The notion of practice meshes the inside
and the outside; collective knowledge resides in the mind (since humans
transmit practices) and in texts and structures of meaning (since
practices result in some form of patterns of action and extra-subjective
structures). Practice theorists assume that shared knowledge is practical
knowledge; there is consequently a strong focus on situations of day-to-
day life. In such situa- tions, individuals perform common practices and
thereby establish and (re-)produce orders. Any assumed incentives
underlying actions are of less concern for practice theorists; rather, the
analytical focus shifts to concrete activities and enacted performances, and
the situations are much more important than the actors themselves.
 SITUATING PRACTICE IN SOCIAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 23

Reckwitz (2002: 249) defines practice as “a routinised type of behav-

iour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another:
forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their
use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how,
states of emotion and motivational knowledge”. The interconnectivity of
all of these elements in action defines a practice, which cannot be
reduced to any single one of them.
Activities and everyday situations are core categories for practice
theorists. For practice theorists, mentalist and textualist accounts over-
complicate and over-intellectualise the world, since they underplay the
importance of everyday action. Too much importance is placed on com-
plex abstract structures, and the ability of any actor to criticise and
compe- tently evaluate the social world is largely dismissed.

2.3 PRACTICE AND THE DISCIPLINE OF INTERNATIONAL

RELATIONS
The Reckwitzian map provides a useful tool for situating practice
theories in the social theory landscape. It is worth keeping in mind that,
like any other map, the Reckwitzian one operates to a defined scale. It
gives us the broad picture, but glosses over many details and differences.
Moreover, it also faces the difficulty that the terrain it seeks to represent
is shifting, as social theory constantly evolves through movements,
mutations and the birth of new theoretical schools. Keeping these
caveats in mind, the social theory map also helps if we zoom in on
international theory and try to situate the emergence of IPT within it.
If we operate on similar level of abstraction, IR has also seen a diversi-
fication in rationalist, norm-oriented and culturalist theories. That much
of international theory of the past decade either relies on the model of
homo economicus and the logic of consequences or homo sociologicus and its
logic of appropriateness has been frequently noted (e.g. Fearon and Wendt
2002). Though proposed as a label in the 1990s by Yosef Lapid and
Friedrich Kratochwil (1996), cultural theory is a less-familiar denominator
in international relations. The discipline of IR prefers the descriptors of
‘constructivism’ or ‘critical theory’ to describe the forms of theorising
that Reckwitz terms as culturalist. In particular, the notion of
constructivism is a peculiar IR construct, since it tends to grasp norm-
oriented theories as well as culturalist theorising, particularly in the
North American context.
24 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

This heterogeneity within constructivism has frequently been

diagnosed.2 As Guzzini (2000: 148) argued, “the sheer diversity seems to
make the category of constructivism explode”. Indeed, one of the
faultlines within constructivist research is whether these centre on
‘norms’ and rely on the logic of appropriateness (Sending 2002).
Many descriptions of critical theory nevertheless come close to
Reckwitz’s outline. In an early description, Richard Ashley provided such
an understanding, arguing that

approaches meriting the label ‘critical’ stress the community-shared back-

ground understandings, skills, and practical predispositions without which it
would be impossible to interpret action, assign meaning, legitimate prac-
tices, empower agents, and constitute a differentiated, highly structured
social reality. (Ashley 1987: 403)

Putting aside labelling issues, the Reckwitzian map of mentalism,

textu- alism, and practice theory usefully captures current international
theory. We find expressions of the mentalist stream in IR, for instance, in
early cognitive-psychological works or constructivist research on ‘ideas’
(although much of this research is inconsistent in so far as it remains
com- mitted to a positivist epistemology, Laffey and Weldes 1997).
Moreover, studies operating with concepts such as ‘belief systems’,
‘world views’, ‘operational codes’, or ‘frames’ rely on mentalist
reasoning. They focus on mental ‘sense-making’ events as the object of
analysis and explore, for instance, the impact of past experiences on
future action. Although based on individuals’ cognitive acts of
interpretation, such stud- ies adopt a mentalism perspective, focusing on
the shared knowledge and meaning structures that coexist in a group’s
mind. However, they distance themselves from the rational actor models of
methodological individualism (Goldstein and Keohane 1993: 7). Studies
analyse the shared effects that ‘experience’ has on political actors in
collective decision making, for exam- ple (Hafner-Burton et al. 2013), or
draw on cognitive psychology to explain the link between personality
profile and leadership style of world leaders (Steinberg 2005) or the
mental schemas of terrorists (Crenshaw 2000).
Textualism has had an enduring effect on international theory,
notably in European and Canadian IR. Introduced in the late 1980s by
the “dis- sidents in international thought” movement (Ashley and Walker
1990), expressions of textualism have become well anchored in the
discipline. We find them under labels such as ‘post-structuralism’,
‘discourse theory’, or
 SITUATING PRACTICE IN SOCIAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 25

‘discourse analysis’. In the aftermath of the so-called ‘third debate’

(Lapid 1989), the study of textual structures became particularly
influential in foreign policy, European integration, and critical security
studies. A range of seminal contributions draws on discourse analysis to
study textual struc- tures as preconditions for the actions of diplomats,
regional cooperation, transnational identity, the identification of threats,
or the development of security strategies.3 If authors rely on different
theorists – including Derrida or Foucault – their studies share the same
objective: to understand world political phenomena by investigating extra-
subjective structures of meaning through which agents achieve the
capability to act. They show, for instance, that shared knowledge
establishes authority, and that textual genres render distinct forms of
knowledge acceptable (Hansen 2006: 7). Thus, language is “a site of
inclusion and exclusion” and creates a “space for producing and
denouncing specific subjectivities within the political realm”
(Herschinger 2011: 13).
International relations theories develop their own disciplinary under-
standings of the Reckwitzian categories; the framework nevertheless allows
us to capture the major lines in the field. This becomes clear if we
consider how practice theory was introduced to IR theory.
A reconstruction of the development of the concept of practices in
international relations is provided by Bueger and Drieschova (2017). As
they show, the concept of practice has substantially influenced several
discussions in IR; these constitute, to some degree, predecessors of prac-
tice theory, as well as productive connections to the larger discipline. A
broad set of scholars labelled as constructivists are included in this over-
view, starting from those who relied on pragmatist thinking in IR, includ-
ing the work of Karl Deutsch, Ernst Hass, and John Ruggie, relying on
assertions concerning knowledge and action similar to practice theory.
The influence of Wittgenstein on the discipline, as represented by the
work of Friedrich Kratochwil and Nicholas Onuf on practical knowledge
and speech acts, the introduction of the sociology of Anthony Giddens
and its idea of practices as mediator of structure and agency by
Alexander Wendt, as well as the neo-institutionalism of James March and
JP Olson, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, which understands
institutions as settled practices, all are examples of constructivist
scholarship in IR that worked with concepts of practice. According to the
same study, the concept of practice was also significant in the feminist
and post-structur- alist debate, starting in the late 1980s. Indeed, an
article from 1988 is credited as the first study that explicitly gave the
concept of practices
26 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

centre stage. Published in International Studies Quarterly, Michael

J. Shapiro et al. (1988) developed the concept of “discursive practices” to
emphasise the contingency of structures of meaning (discourse) and
their reliance on enactments.
When Neumann (2002) introduced practice theory, he did so by con-
trasting it with textualism, arguing that studies of discourse remain too
focused on structures of meaning and overemphasise language at the price
of the material conditions. He thereby emphasised the continuities of
practice theory with earlier discussions. Rather than contrasting practice
theory with textualist accounts, Pouliot (2008) demonstrated the advan-
tages of practices in contrast to constructivist approaches, in particular by
exploring the differences with a logic of appropriateness.
The Reckwitzian map gives a sense of orientation. It allows for under-
standing practice theory by a strategy of ‘othering’. Such a ‘negative’
strat- egy runs the risk of underplaying the commonalities between
culturalist theorising and neglecting the many links that exist between
de facto expressions of mentalism, textualism, and practice theory, however.
This is notably the case for differing variants of post-structuralism that
emphasise practice (e.g. Wodak 2011).
Carving out intellectual space through othering is a helpful, but also
dangerous tool. We therefore also require a positive approximation of prac-
tice theory. This can be done by identifying the commitments that
practice scholars rely on. In the next section, we outline these
commitments, sum- marising them under the concepts of process,
knowledge, learning, mate- riality, multiplicity, performativity and
empiricity. The differing ways in which these commitments may be
interpreted is then shown in the suc- ceeding chapters, which outline the
core approaches of IPT and the ways that these concepts present
challenges to be addressed in empirical work.

2.4 THE COMMITMENTS OF INTERNATIONAL

PRACTICE THEORY
The map primarily gives us an understanding of practice theory by
distin- guishing it from other perspectives. This is to provide orientation,
but, as already discussed, such distinctions should not be exaggerated.
Another strategy for better understanding what practice theories are and
what they aim to do is to develop an outline of their core ideas. We
attempt this below, arguing that practice theories share a number of core
commitments to certain themes, rather than assumptions. Again, this
outline needs to be taken with a grain of salt; as we will see in the
following chapters, practice
 SITUATING PRACTICE IN SOCIAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 27

theorists share these commitments, but tend to prioritise and interpret

them quite differently. In our view, there are seven core commitments that
describe the idea of practice theory quite comprehensively: emphasis of
process, practical knowledge, collectivity, materiality, multiplicity, perfor-
mativity and empiricity.
Understanding practice theory as being composed by a number of
core commitments provides a restrictive definition, limiting our
understanding of what it should encompass to a narrower range than that
suggested by Adler and Pouliot. Put another way, not everyone who
studies practices is a practice theorist. That said, the approach is broader
than what is conven- tionally understood in IR; most notably, different
variations of pragmatist theorising are included. In adopting the notion
of commitments, our claim is not to have found a definite core that every
variant of practice theory or every practice theorist shares or ‘believes’.
Rather, we argue that conducting practice-theoretical analysis involves
engaging with a number of themes and concerns. The commitments
concern what one can achieve with a practice-theoretical approach and
clarify the reasons for centring analysis on the unit of practice. Questions
such as what a practice is remain open to continual interpretation and
reconstruction in the conduct of actual practices of research, however
(Kratochwil 2011: 37–43).
Firstly, practice theories emphasise process over stasis, foregrounding
the procedural dimension of practice, and positing that any process requires
activity. Practice theorists therefore prefer verbs such as ‘ordering’,
‘struc- turing’, and ‘knowing’ over the respective (static) nouns of ‘order’,
‘struc- ture’, or ‘knowledge’. With such a “prioritisation of process over
substance, relation over separateness, and activity over passivity”
(Guillaume 2007: 742), practice theories interpret the international
through relational ontol- ogies (Jackson and Nexon 1999). Scholars
thereby bypass essentialist and static notions of the international and
sideline distinctions that emphasise them, such as the one between agency
and structure. Practices in this sense have no substance, but must be
thought of as emergent.
Secondly, practice theories offer a distinct perspective on knowledge.
They situate knowledge in practice and thereby develop a unified
account of knowing and doing (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009).
Connecting ‘prac- tice’, ‘acting’, and ‘knowing’, implies understanding
knowledge as “knowing from within” (Shotter 1993: 7). Such a
conception of knowledge extends beyond conventional understandings
of ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’. Practices cannot be reduced to
background knowledge, however. While knowledge, its application, and
creation cannot be separated from action, “it would be wrong to see the
concept of practice as merely a synonym for
28 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

action” (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003b: 20). In practice, the actor, his
beliefs and values, resources, and external environment are integrated
“in one ‘activity system’, in which social, individual and material aspects are
interde- pendent” (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003b: 20). As a result,
knowledge cannot be essentialised, but is instead a spatiotemporally
situated phenomenon.
Thirdly, practice theories consider knowing and the acquisition of
knowledge by learning as inherently collective processes. Members of a
distinct group (for example, medical professionals, football players, or
children in a nursery) learn and internalise practices as ‘rules of the
game’ primarily through interaction. Practices as “repeated interactional
pat- terns” achieve temporary stability because “the need to engage one
another forces people to return to common structures” (Swidler 2001:
85). In the medical sphere, for instance, formal rules and algorithms
provide guidelines in medical operations to guarantee standard practices.
These prevent doctors from having to make every decision anew in com-
plicated situations. However, performing a practice does not necessarily
presuppose an interactional dimension. Human collectiveness is not a gen-
eral criterion for the sociality of practices. Practices can also involve an
“interobjective structure”, for example, when actors learn a practice
through interaction with a machine or computer without necessarily
com- municating with other people (Reckwitz 2010: 117).
Fourthly, practice theorists contend that practices have materiality; bod-
ies are the main carrier of practices, but are not the only one: material
artefacts or technologies can also fulfil this function. The materiality and
embodiment of the world is an aspect that tends to be sidelined in other
social and culturalist theorising, whereas for practice theorists, the world is
“continually doing things, things that bear upon us not as observation
statements upon disembodied intellects but as forces upon material beings”
(Pickering 1995: 6). To stress the impact of objects, things, and artefacts
on social life is not to merely add the element of materiality, it is an attempt
to give non-humans a more precise role in the ontologies of the world.
Fifthly, social order is understood as multiplicity: instead of assuming
universal or global wholes, the assumption is that there are always multiple
and overlapping orders (Schatzki 2002: 87). There is never a single
reality, but always multiple ones. This does not imply chaos, limitless
plurality, or an atomised understanding of order; orderliness is,
however, an achieve- ment. It requires work, and emerges from routines
and repetitiveness in “situated accomplishments” of actors (Lynch
2001: 131). As such, order is always shifting and emergent; the
assumption is that actors are reflexive and establish social orders through
mutual accounts. Thus, the permanent
 SITUATING PRACTICE IN SOCIAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 29

(re-)production of ‘accountability’ is preserved through ongoing

practical accomplishments. Practices therefore have a dual role, both
creating order through accountability, and serving to alter the ‘structure’
by the innova- tiveness of reflexive agents.
Sixthly, practice theories embrace a performative understanding of the
world; the world depends on practice. This ‘world of becoming’ is the
product of ongoing establishment, re-enactment, and maintenance of
rela- tions between actors, objects, and material artefacts. The concept of
enact- ment turns the focus away from the idea that objects or structures
have assumed a fixed, stable identity and that closure is achieved at some
point. Enactment stresses the genuine openness of any construction
process. Construction is never complete; objects, structures, or norms,
therefore, exist primarily in practice. They are real because they are part
of practices, and are enacted in them. Such a performative understanding
avoids attempting “to tame” practice and to “control its unruliness and
instabil- ity,” as Doty (1997: 376) noted early on. In practice theory, “[…]
practice must entail an acceptance of its indeterminacy. It must entail a
decentering of practice” (Doty 1997: 376). This also clarifies that practice
is not a sub- stance; it is continuously emergent and dependent on
performances.
Seventhly, practice theorists give primacy to the empirical, and call for
a readjustment of the relation between theory and practice. Practice
theory is best understood as a methodological orientation in which
concepts pro- vide starting points, allow one to problematise, and ask
empirical ques- tions. Praxiography – the methodology corresponding to
practice theory – is akin to ethnography since it takes the observation of
practices as its primary basis. Research, and, in particular, writing is seen
as performative rather than descriptive. One is producing the
phenomenon one is talking about. These seven commitments stress that
undertaking practice theoretical analysis implies engaging with a range of
core themes and concerns. Laying out these commitments gives us a
sense of how practice theory coheres and defines its limits. Our
intention is not, however, to ‘police’ what prac- tice theory is and what it
is not. Considering these commitments never-
theless clarifies some of the boundaries.
Ringmar’s (2014) general attack on the promises of practice theory,
for instance, targets two studies. He criticises Abrahamsen and Williams’
work (2011) as being nothing more than rational choice theory (Ringmar
2014: 10). Abrahamsen and Williams do indeed combine different
approaches and do not follow Bourdieu dogmatically, but it is through
this compre- hensive practice-oriented approach that they successfully
explain the growth of private security in globalisation as a complex
relational phenomenon,
30 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

thus overcoming the dualism of local and global. The study therefore
relies on the outlined commitments. We agree, however, with Ringmar’s
(2014: 13) criticism of Patrick Morgan’s study on practices of deterrence
(Morgan 2011) that offers a “reconstruction of the intentions and aims of
actors involved.” Morgan’s argumentation is rooted in methodological
individualism and strategic action that has little in common with the con-
cerns of practice theory.
The commitments outlined provide general criteria to bring
coherence to international practice theory. As discussed in the next
section, one should not read them as ‘shared assumptions and beliefs’;
practice-driven approaches draw on the commitments and develop them
in different ways.

2.5 INTRODUCING KEY APPROACHES

In the following two chapters, we introduce a range of approaches to
IPT. Our discussion shows that the outlined commitments may be inter-
preted differently. By the notion of approach, we do not want to argue
that these are consistent ‘theories’ of practice; instead, they provide
dedi- cated ways of dealing with practices, through the outline of a
conceptual vocabulary and by providing strategies for research.
Although a range of these approaches gravitate towards the body of
work of an individual author, such as Pierre Bourdieu or Michel Foucault,
being approaches for the study of practice, they are better understood as
clusters of research and collectives of researchers concerned with a similar
set of concepts and strat- egies. Phrased otherwise, in outlining the
approaches, our concern is not with the exegesis of an author’s work, but
with discussing the purposes for which certain concepts and strategies
have been developed, and how they have been translated to and
advanced in light of international practices.
We offer a concise introduction to core approaches of IPT, and discuss
their origins and use in IR. We discuss seven approaches: (1) the
praxeol- ogy of Pierre Bourdieu, (2) the understanding of practice of
Michel Foucault, (3) the communities of practice approach, (4) the
practice ontology of Theodore Schatzki, (5) the narrative approach, (6)
actor- network theory, and (7) the pragmatic sociology inspired by the
work of Luc Boltanski. We do not want to limit practice theory to these
approaches, but rather take these as a selection. Nevertheless, they are
the ones that have been thriving in IR; their productivity has been
proven and they show great promise in providing further insights on
world politics. Together they showcase the spectrum and diversity of IPT
scholarship.
 SITUATING PRACTICE IN SOCIAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 31

We document how each approach introduces practice theoretical con-

cerns and uses the concept of practice, and familiarise ourselves with their
main principles and guidelines, drawing on examples of empirical research.
Defining the contours of IPT is an ongoing controversy; we therefore
intend to reflect on the advantages and drawbacks attributed to each
per- spective, providing us with a valuable picture of the broad
repertoire of IPT approaches and their strengths and weaknesses. Table 2.2
provides an overview of the core concepts, relevant IR studies and the
main weak- nesses of each approach.

Table 2.2 Overview of main approaches in IPT

Core concepts Exemplary IPT studies Main weaknesses

Bourdieusian
praxeology field, habitus, Adler-Nissen (2013a, Overemphasis of the
capital, doxa 2014); Berling (2012); regularity of practice;
Guzzini (2000); Too strong focus on
Guilhot (2005); domination and
Pouliot (2010a, b); reproduction of
Kuus (2015); hierarchies;
Leander (2005); Lack of attention to
Abrahamsen and agency and change;
Williams (2011) Downplays
Foucault’s materiality.
practice governmentality, Sending and Focus on large scale
theory problematisation, Neumann (2006); formations;
apparatus, discursive Merlingen (2006); tends towards
practices Lö wenheim (2008) linguistic and
discursive practices
Overly concerned
with power
Communities of community, Adler (2005, 2008); Unclear if concept of
practice learning, mutual Adler and Greve (2009); community can be
engagement, joint Bicchi (2011); adopted to large
enterprise, Bueger (2013b); scale;
repertoires Hofius (2016); Silences questions of
Graeger (2016) power and
hierarchies;
Idealizes collectives
and overemphasizes
social cohesion
through “community
metaphor”.
(continued)
32 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Table 2.2 (continued)

Core concepts Exemplary IPT studies Main weaknesses

Schatzki’s
ontology of teleo-affective Navari (2010), Bially Strong focus on
practice structures; Mattern (2011): ontology;
organisation; Tends to turn
bundles and meshes; practice into a
material substance; Difficult
arrangements; translation into
Narrative human agency empirical research.
approaches narration, Buckley-Zistel (2014); Overemphasizes
storytelling, plots, Devetak (2009); linguistic dimension;
polyphony, Neumann (2002, 2005); Risks introducing a
metaphors, myths Gadinger et al. (2014b); new dualism between
Jarvis and Holland practice and
(2014) narrative;
Concept of
‘narration’ remains
Actor-network fuzzy.
theory actants, relations, Bueger and Bethke Lack of attention to
translation, (2014); Mayer (2012), history and social
blackbox, passage Schouten (2014); stability over time;
points, laboratory, Walters (2002); Style of analysis raises
non-humans questions of
intelligibility;
Anti-humanist stance
raises ethical
Pragmatic concerns.
sociology controversies, Borghi (2011); Gadinger Overemphasizes the
situations, (2016); Gadinger and importance of justice
uncertainty, Yildiz (2012); Hanrieder and morality;
justification, (2016); Niemann Lack of attention for
critique, (2015); Eagleton-Pierce other practices than
Orders of Worth, (2014); Scheper (2015) justification and
critique.
SITUATING PRACTICE IN SOCIAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 33

NOTES
1. As exemplarily argued by Nicholas Onuf (2015): “I have some reservations
about the metaphor ‘turn.’ Do we imagine IR as a colossal ship that turns,
however slowly, all of a piece? I’ve already used the ship metaphor, but in
this context it’s not appropriate – we’re not that put together, and, besides,
no one is steering (not even those legendary gate-keepers). Or a herd of
wildebeests, in which all the members of the herd turn together by keying
off each other once one senses danger and turns? I don’t think so, even if
we do sometimes see signs of a herd mentality.”
2. See Guzzini (2000), Kratochwil (2000), Onuf (2002), as well as the more
recent reconstruction by Kessler (2016).
3. See among others the contributions in Ashley and Walker (1990), Walker
(1993), or Hansen (2006).
 CHAPTER 3

Approaches in International
Practice Theory I

In this chapter, we introduce four approaches that all have their origins
in the work of a major intellectual figure in practice theory: Pierre
Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Etienne Wenger, and Theodore Schatzki. As
already emphasised, our goal is not exegesis or a close reading of the
respective body of literature, but a concise introduction to the
conceptual vocabulary and strategies for the study of practice outlined in
the discussion of the work. In leaving the question of interpretation of
these authors to others, our objective is pragmatic and directed towards
identifying meaningful ways of studying practices and their advantages
and disadvantages.

3.1 THE PRaXEOLOGY OF PIERRE BOURDIEU

Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most important theorists in the
development of practice theory. His praxeology holds a prominent place,
particularly because of the significance of his Outline of a Theory of
Practice (Bourdieu 1977) and the tradition he established in French
sociology. His thinking also occupies a central place in IPT. Indeed, until
recently, IPT was virtu- ally equated with Bourdieu’s work. The
attraction of Bourdieu lies not least in the fact that his approach comes
closest to a coherent research programme for IPT. Moreover, the
praxeological conceptual apparatus seems relatively easily adaptable to
IR research. The key concepts of habi- tus, field and capital seemingly
correspond to IR categories such as strat- egy, conflicts and culture
(Adler-Nissen 2013a). Moreover, as Vincent

© The Author(s) 2018 35

C. Bueger, F. Gadinger, International Practice
Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-
73350-0_3
36 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Pouliot and Frédéric Mérand (2013: 36) suggest, “Bourdieu’s thought is

at its core a theory of domination”. This makes his practice approach
com- patible with a discipline traditionally concerned with power relations,
con- flicts and hierarchical structures.
For Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2013b: 2), Bourdieu questions theoretical
assumptions in IR by dissolving the agency-structure problem, offering
an epistemological position between objective and interpretive research
tradi- tions, whilst dissecting the static notion of the state. By drawing on
Bourdieu’s key concepts, “it is possible to map political units as spaces of
practical knowledge on which diverse and often ‘unconventional’
agencies position themselves and therefore shape international politics”
(Adler- Nissen 2013b: 2). Didier Bigo and Mikael R. Madsen (2011: 220)
argue along similar lines when they suggest that Bourdieu himself was
not par- ticularly interested in international studies, but this does not mean
that his sociology and conceptual tools are not applicable outside of
France and the discipline of sociology. With regard to global issues,
Bourdieu’s per- spective is particularly useful, not in taking grand
notions such as globali- sation, internationalisation, or international
community for granted or as a premise for research, but “to
sociologically reconstruct these categories in light of their particular
trajectories and histories” (Bigo and Madsen 2011: 220).
In the following, we firstly discuss a number of core concepts in
Bourdieusian vocabulary, before turning towards the question of how
they have been employed to study international phenomena. We then
engage in a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the approach.
Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus is a complex one. It is comprised of a
series of interrelated terms, of which ‘habitus’, ‘field’, ‘capital’ and ‘doxa’
are the most important. His main intention in developing this framework
was for Bourdieu to overcome what he saw as the weaknesses of the
sub- jectivist explanations committed to a methodological
individualism, as well as notions of objectivism as identifiable in
textualist accounts. The aim is to construct a dynamic vocabulary that
enables an analysis of the
emergence and reproduction of practice.
The concepts of habitus and field are the main pillars upon which
Bourdieu’s framework rests. Habitus is a concept that acts as the “work
horse in his theory” (Berard 2005: 203). The concept refers to the inter-
mediary element between agents and structures. It seeks to grasp the prac-
tical knowledge inscribed in individuals. For Bourdieu (1977: 82–83),
the habitus is a “system of lasting, transposable dispositions which,
integrating
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 37

past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions,

appreciations, and actions”. Pouliot (2008: 273–274) eloquently sum-
marises habitus in arguing that it has four dimensions: firstly, habitus is
to be understood historically, and is marked by individual and collective
tra- jectories; secondly, it relies on the internalisation of practical, tacit
knowl- edge learned by doing, that is, from direct experience in and
with the world; thirdly, habitus is a relational term, that is, collective
dispositions are gathered through embodied traces of inter-subjective
interactions; and fourthly, habitus is dispositional in the sense that it
does not determine actions mechanically, but rather initiates distinct
courses of action. The function of the habitus in social life, then, can be
understood as a practical sense that gives actors implicit rules on how to
behave in a specific situa- tion in relation to their social position. A
habitus is formed through similar conditions of socialisation in a distinct
group or class, from childhood on. The habitus is further strengthened
by bodily habituation, which leads actors to refrain from questioning
their social position, since it appears legitimate and self-evident.
Bourdieu refers to this (1977: 164) as doxa or doxic practice. The term
doxa is closely related to the logic of habit (Hopf 2010: 545) and
captures common-sense knowledge in contrast to true knowledge.
Bourdieu took this opposition, as Anna Leander (2011: 304) argues, and
endowed it with the implication that to gain true knowledge about the
social world, it is necessary to understand the doxa, the common- sense
understandings that underpin it. The “doxa is so central to the pro-
duction of social hierarchies, politics and power precisely because it is
common sense – and hence unquestioned/mis-recognised” (Leander
2011: 304). Habitus is primarily used as a concept to explain tendencies
of social reproduction; for instance, when forms of practices are exception-
ally stable or constant in certain milieus or classes despite obvious difficul-
ties such as inequality or inefficiency.
The habitus provides a basis for the generation of practices, but it
does so only in relation to a specific situation or a distinct field. This
leads to Bourdieu’s second key term. A field is basically a social
configuration structured along relations of power, objects of struggle and
taken-for- granted rules (Pouliot 2008: 274). Fields such as art, politics
or econom- ics are characterised as hierarchical systems of positions in
which some agents are dominant, and others are dominated. These
unequal positions are defined through different forms of capital, a term
with which Bourdieu aimed to encapsulate power resources. Capital,
therefore, includes mate- rial possessions and non-material sources of
value such as prestige or
38 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

authority that are converted into four different forms: economic,

cultural, social and symbolic capital. The latter is, in fact, the main basis
of domina- tion, in that it carries with it the power of legitimation and the
capacity to define what counts as common sense (Nicolini 2013: 59).
A field can be compared to a common social game in which distinct
rules are learned as well as applied. In this game, agents attempt to
estab- lish or improve their position by maximising the accumulation of
capital (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1996: 168–175). Being a successful
player in a game requires one to generate a practical sense or a ‘feeling
for the game’. This sense is, in turn, dependent upon the relative strength
of forms of capital of the agents and the dispositions of the habitus. The
competence of practical sense is apportioned differently among the players,
which leads to hierarchies and unequal preconditions to succeed in
gaining profits. The tacit practical knowledge leads back to the doxa and
the seemingly self-evident rules that regulate the legitimate or
illegitimate character of practices. The games played in fields are
significantly shaped by conflict and struggle through competition. With
these concepts, Bourdieu devel- ops a complex theoretical system, and it
is important not to isolate the concepts from each other. Recognising the
relationships between the con- cepts is important; that is, the relations
between incorporated sociality and embodied history (habitus), current
practices, and objectified sociality in systems of position (field).
The terms habitus, field, capital and doxa provide a productive relational
framework for studying international practices. The advantage of the
term ‘field’ is that actors are not studied in isolation, but through their
practical relations to each other. Fields enable a distinct space of action
for actors; while the field incorporates the objective component of a distinct
hierarchi- cal sphere such as art, economics or even European security,
the habitus focuses on the experiences and strategies of individuals seeking
to establish or achieve an advantageous position within it. The habitus is
the origin of the practices that reproduce or change the existing
structures of the field. These practices again shape the experiences of
actors, form their habitus and stabilise power structures in the field. In
this sense, Bourdieu succeeds with his relational framework by
overcoming subjectivist and objectivist explanations of social life. His
emphasis on critical reflexivity when doing research “helps IR
researchers move away from the self-legitimising and descriptive
accounts of international institutions and organisations, to a more
sociologically informed analysis” (Adler-Nissen 2013b: 11). Such a
notion of reflexivity also turns the production of scientific knowledge,
including in IR, into an object of analysis (Berling 2011).
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 39

Bourdieu has been influential in IR since the late 1980s. Early on,
authors such as Richard Ashley (1987) and Stefano Guzzini (2000)
pointed to the contribution of Bourdieu’s theory of fields in understand-
ing transnational spaces. Bourdieu’s terminology became increasingly
used in IR in this way, with a range of transnational fields being studied.
European security relations were described in critical security studies as a
transnational field of (in)security experts by scholars such as Didier Bigo
(2005), Jef Huysmans (2006), and Trine Villumsen Berling (2012). Such
a view on European ‘insecurity professionals’ as an emerging field may
explain, for instance, the high degree of hegemony over European
security knowledge (Bigo 2002: 64).
Nicolas Guilhot (2005) proposed understanding the career of
practices of democracy promotion through a “transnational field of
democracy pro- motion”. Migration as a transnational phenomenon can
be also analysed by Bourdieu’s field theory to describe the ambiguous
role of migrants between their home and new state (Levitt and Schiller
2004). Pouliot (2008) suggested understanding the transatlantic security
community as a field constituted by shared practices of regulating
conflicts by diplomatic and non-violent practices. Leander (2005) relied
on the field concept to interpret the emergence of private military
companies, meanwhile.
Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams (2011) draw on the concept
of field to describe privatisation in global security. They explain the emer-
gence of the transnational commercial security sector as “a complex re-
articulation of relations between public and private, global and local
security actors, where the categories of public and private, global and
local continue to have effects on security practices even as they are being
trans- formed” (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011: 311). By using
Bourdieu’s forms of capital as resources of power, they demonstrate that
the growth of private security is closely related to its increasing acquisition
of forms of capital that provide private actors with new possibilities to
play powerful roles in the security field. To be accepted as a key player in
the field, it is not sufficient to acquire economic capacity alone. Instead,
as Abrahamsen and Williams (2011: 315) argue, the acquisition of
cultural and symbolic capital is “at the core of the increasingly recognised
competence of private security actors, a status itself connected to wider
social practices involving the commodifica- tion and technification of
security” that has become accepted as a service or a commodity to be
bought and sold in a competitive market place.
While the notion of the field provides a good methodological entry
point for Bourdieu-based research in IR, the concept makes sense only in
relation to habitus, capital or doxa. In Pouliot’s (2010a, b) study of
40 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

NATO-Russia diplomacy, for instance, the notion of field is a starting

point for describing an emerging political sphere in which new
diplomatic prac- tices are negotiated and established. Based on dozens of
interviews and historical text analysis, he demonstrates that diplomacy
has become a nor- mal, though not self-evident, practice between the two
former enemies. Accordingly, some situations such as the intervention in
Kosovo, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution or the Russia-Georgia conflict were
resolved. During the height of the Cold War, such incidents would have
typically led to seri- ous crises. However, the concept of habitus is
essential here as a driving force to explain this dynamic, but still fragile
relationship of ‘limited paci- fication’, which is the result of ongoing
symbolic power struggles. NATO’s practices of double enlargement have
contributed to the resurgence of Russia’s Great Power habitus and the
growing creation of hysteresis in the international security game, as well
as its role description as a player. This habitus of Russia hinders the
development of a common security commu- nity when, for instance,
“Russian practitioners take for granted that as a Great Power they ought
not to adopt others’ procedures without a mini- mal amount of
negotiation and compromise” (Pouliot 2010a, b: 235).
The changing field of European security is another major case
illustrat- ing the adoption of Bourdieu’s framework in IR. Studies by
Berling (2012) and Adler-Nissen (2014) have shown how revealing such
an analy- sis can be. Berling draws on Bourdieusian concepts to explain
profound and unexpected transformations in European security by
understanding them as symbolic power struggles of security agents over
legitimate defini- tions of security. Her concept of “doxic battles” points to
the mobilisation of different forms of capital by security agents during
the profound change in taken-for-granted assumptions (doxa) (Berling
2012: 471). While the European security field during the Cold War was
structured by a belief that threats could be measured materially and
ideologically, and that the ‘nature’ of the international system caused
war to be a recurring phenom- enon, these deep, doxic structures of
European security were challenged by social science think tanks and
academic experts. A number of European think tanks made strategic
moves in arguing in favour of the centrality of the EU as opposed to
NATO to overcome traditional strategic thinking centred on military
capabilities. The European way was described as more productive in the
long term, in contrast to the short-term military orien- tation of NATO.
These newcomers acquired new forms of scientific and cultural capital,
were accepted as legitimate speakers in the field, and
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 41

succeeded in shifting the hierarchy of the European security field that

had traditionally been structured by military capital and scientific capital
based in realist IR conceptions (Berling 2012: 467f.).
In short, Berling’s Bourdieu-based ‘action framework’ suggests under-
standing the European security field as a power struggle between agents
seeking to reshape the definition of security. It also questions the distinc-
tion of theory and practice. Accordingly, “social scientific knowledge was
recast as a type of capital in the hands of agents and social science agents
entered the struggles as agents in the European security field” (Berling
2012: 473).
Struggles over symbolic power can also be observed in related fields,
such as European diplomacy. Adler-Nissen (2014) shows that national
diplomacy is challenged by the rise of non-state actors, from transna-
tional companies to non-governmental organisations that struggle for
dominant positions in the field. The EU’s new diplomatic service (the
European External Action Service), one of the most important foreign
policy innovations in Europe to date, does not, on the one hand, chal-
lenge national diplomacy in a material sense. On the other hand, it
symbolically questions the state’s meta-capital and monopolistic position
of symbolic power when defining, for instance, the “genuine diplomat”
(Adler-Nissen 2014: 671).
Following this argument, Merje Kuus (2015) analyses symbolic power
in diplomatic practice in Brussels by focusing on the intangible and incal-
culable ‘feel for the game’ that distinguishes a well-informed and relaxed
insider from an ill-informed and ill-at-ease outsider in European Union
diplomatic circles. Kuus identifies different features of diplomatic prac-
tices, centring on notions of reputation, presence, poise, composure, and
elegance. Through interviews with several diplomats, it becomes clear that
the acquisition of this practical knowledge does not depend only on elite
education and other easily trainable skills. Rather, the “issue is ease; a
cer- tain attitude, an intangible and unquantifiable capacity to objectify
the objectification of the social gaze” (Kuus 2015: 377). For Kuus (2015:
369), daily cultural practices are not mere icing on the cake, but a con-
stituent component of power relations, in diplomacy as much as anywhere
else. Studies such as those by Berling, Adler-Nissen, and Kuus focus on
symbolic power struggles to show the limitations of existing approaches,
which either overemphasise institutional capacities or oversimplify the
structural forces of globalisation and interdependence.
42 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Bourdieu developed his framework by studying religion, art and poli-

tics in France. On the surface, it would seem that his work is deeply situ-
ated in a local context, and has little to contribute to international
politics. Bourdieu’s praxeology is an open conceptual framework,
however. His field terminology is flexible and avoids setting strict
boundaries concern- ing who or what belongs to the field. A major
promise of using the con- cept of field is the rejection of the opposition
between society and individuals by instead providing a relational approach.
The research objec- tive focuses on the practices of transnational
activities, which avoids sim- plistic boundaries between domestic and
international arenas and explores the historical trajectories of fields of
power in the global realm (Bigo 2011). This term can, therefore, as we
have shown, be an invaluable device for the analysis of transnational
space.
There are, however, several theoretical challenges associated with the
term, since it was never fully defined by Bourdieu. These conceptual
ambi- guities concern, for instance, when shared practices constitute a
field, whether there is a hierarchy between fields, and how they relate to
each other. It is not clear how many fields there are, or where exactly the
bound- aries between the fields lie. However, the main proponents of
Bourdieu in IR, such as Pouliot, Berling or Adler-Nissen, demonstrate
that research on security, identity, community, and sovereignty can benefit
from a Bourdieu- based perspective. Such research sheds light on
overlooked aspects of international politics, for instance the knowledge
practices of experts.
A major strength of Bourdieu’s framework, therefore, lies in its ability
to dissect symbolic power struggles in politics, which are more complex
and subtle than is conventionally acknowledged in IR. As a result, study-
ing power relations by drawing on Bourdieu takes IR research in new
directions, as Adler-Nissen and Pouliot (2014) have demonstrated, and
contributes to the debate on different faces of power, as initiated by
Barnett and Duvall (2005). Pouliot (2016) describes multilateral diplo-
macy and the governance of international security as the production,
reproduction and contestation of local diplomatic hierarchies that practi-
tioners often call ‘pecking orders’. Such a perspective is therefore less
interested in primarily structural resources of material capabilities, and
more in the distinctive forms of social stratification organised around a
struggle for diplomatic competence in sets of practices like esprit de
corps or reporting through brokering.
Ingvild Bode (2017), for instance, complements a Bourdieusian per-
spective by considering individual agency in a more substantial manner. By
following Michel de Certeau, she analyses decision-making processes at
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 43

the Security Council and examines reflective practices of a strategic or

tactical nature. Portraying practices as reflective rather than as being based
only on tacit knowledge highlights how actors may creatively adapt their
practices to social situations, and furthermore shows that individuals
become recognised as competent performers because of their
personality, understood as plural socialisation experiences (Bode 2017).
Bode’s work is a prime example of the increasingly mutual exchange
between Bourdieu’s praxeology and French pragmatism. There are some
lesser-known Bourdieusian concepts, such as the nomos, which describes the
underlying normative order structuring a field of interactions (Epstein 2013:
165), that are yet to be employed more fully in IR research, however.
In summary, Bourdieu’s praxeology helps IR scholars move towards a
theoretically informed empirical sociology. The most promising way could
be, as Adler-Nissen (2013b: 13) states using a term of Leander’s (2008),
to employ Bourdieusian vocabulary as a ‘thinking tool’ that allows for a
certain perspective, but needs to be developed further and adjusted to
the needs of situated research contexts. Concepts like the field or habitus
can also be accentuated in more dynamic terms of pragmatism (Leander
2011). This implies following Bourdieu’s methodological dictum of con-
structing one’s own interpretations in direct interaction with an
empirical case (Adler-Nissen 2013b: 13).
This analytical strength, however, can also be turned into a criticism.
Due to the explicit focus on domination, power and hierarchies, one
could gain the impression that practice is always embedded in power
struggles. Indeed, the focus of Bourdieu’s vocabulary is on structures of
power and domination, and less on the extensive range of other
sociocultural practices (Hillebrandt 2009: 389). Another key criticism
levelled against Bourdieu is his structural determinism (de Certeau
1984: 57–59). The main target of this criticism is the concept of habitus,
which can be understood as a mechanism of reproduction (King 2000).
These criticisms are, to some degree, misleading, since Bourdieu’s
dynamic understanding of habitus conceptualises it as being in a
constant state of evolution through chang- ing conditions in fields and
forces of adaption (Jackson 2008: 170–171).
Bourdieu (1990: 55) emphasised that actors adopt a particular
habitus only with a certain, albeit high, degree of probability, and that
this habitus also allows for the possibility of behavioural variation,
although in his major works the habitus tends to be constantly confirmed
or reproduced (Joas and Knö bl 2009: 393). Nevertheless, it is fair to say
that the empha- sis of Bourdieu’s praxeology is on the stability, regularity
and reproduction of practices, and less on subversion and renewal.
44 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

For Bourdieu, routinisation and reproduction is the norm in social life

(Reckwitz 2004a, b: 46). For instance, Bourdieu’s two core praxeological
studies – the everyday practices of the Kabyle community (Bourdieu 1977)
and the cultural codes of the French bourgeoisie in Distinction (Bourdieu
1986) – concentrate mainly on understanding conservative mechanisms of
repetition and stability. The fact that in both cases a high tendency of
reproduction can be observed does not mean that this is a core feature
for a general ‘logic of practice’ (Reckwitz 2004b: 49). Both cases depend
on the specific cultural codes and the acquirement of practical knowledge
and cannot, therefore, be used as a foil for generalisation.
Consequently, the structure of his theory tends to be rather static.
This is less a result of one of his concepts, but is primarily caused by his
ten- dency to assume the homogeneity of the world. This problem
applies to the uniformity of habitus, the overlapping relationship of
habitus and field, and the dichotomised conception of power struggles
between new- comers and established actors in a field (Schä fer 2013:
116–120).
Bourdieu’s practice thought provides few starting points for a theory
of social change. Although he states that processes of change in the fields
of literature and painting (Bourdieu 1996), for instance, are most likely
to be triggered by newcomers entering the field for the first time, and
that each field requires its own models of change, this does not provide
for a genu- ine theory of social change, as Hans Joas and Wolfgang
Knö bl (2009: 395) argue. As his studies focused on only a few fields, his
work inevitably lacks general statements about social change.

3.2 MICHEL FOUCaULT, PROBLEMaTIsaTION

aND GOVERNMENTaLITY

Michel Foucault is one of the best-known French intellectuals and theo-

rists. His influence on social theory is significant, and few disciplines
have been left untouched by his work in one way or another. His
studies have visibly influenced IR debates since at least the 1970s (e.g.
Ruggie 1975), while the first article-length treatments of his ideas began
to be published in the late 1980s (including Shapiro, Bonham, and
Heradstveit 1988 in International Studies Quarterly and Keeley 1990 in
International Organizations). Foucault’s work has generally been
received in IR (as else- where) as that of a theorist of discourse and
power; in other words, he is understood as a textualist, rather than a
practice theorist.
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 45

As Clive Barnett (2015), among others, notes, there are, however,

different versions of ‘Foucault’ or what Colin Koopman and Tomas
Matza (2013: 817) call “Foucaultisms” at work. These range “from a
theorist of power, to a model of intellectual commitment, or an inspira-
tion for new models of ethico-political practice” (Barnett 2015: 1).
There is “also a hardening division of labour between an increasingly
sophisticated field of exegesis and a longer standing tradition of applica-
tion of Foucault’s ideas. Cutting across this division is another, between
readings of Foucault by “ontologizers” and by “empiricists.” This divi-
sion might also be characterised in terms of readings of Foucault’s work
in search of grand concepts (of power, of biopolitics, of discipline), and
readings that find there a model of analysis, if not quite a methodology”
(Barnett 2015: 2).
In reading Foucault as a practice theorist, we foreground a number of
concepts and themes, some of which have not been treated in this
manner by the Foucauldian literature in IR. Firstly, discussing Foucault
allows us to further elaborate on the relationship and fluid boundaries
between practice theory, textualism and discourse analysis. Here, it is
particularly Foucault’s concept of ‘discursive practices’ that is of interest,
in that it can be read in a practice theoretical way. Secondly, we like to
re-appropriate the pragmatist side of Foucault and emphasise that his
theorising be con- cerned with contingency rather than order and
structures. Seen from this perspective, his work needs to be understood
not as providing a global theory of power or anything else, but as
empirically specific inquiries that provide useful concepts and analytical
methods (Koopman and Matza 2013). Thirdly, we recognise that
Foucault introduces the problem of the historicity of practices in a
unique way. We fourthly place particular emphasis on how he provides
concepts for studying practices of governing (governmentality).1
‘Discourse’ and ‘discursive practices’ are two of Foucault’s core terms.
He develops these in the Order of Things and Archaeology of Knowledge.
Given his focus on structures of meaning in these early works, they are
often considered (e.g. by Reckwitz 2002: 248) as developing a textualist
account that locates meaning in the structures, rather than the practical
and material process of their production. By contrast, Foucault’s later
works, in particular his analytics of government, are seen to be much closer
to practice theoretical concerns.
Recently, there has been a tendency to reinterpret his early works along
practice theoretical lines, and to argue against a break in Foucault’s work
46 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

or a fundamental re-orientation. Reading the early works in such a way

implies shifting emphasis from a focus on discourse as reproduction and
stabilisation of order, to discursive practices as ordering and structuring.
Foucault theorised discourse as discursive practices, that is, as configura-
tions of statement-making sayings. For him, statements are
performances (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 74). However, rather than
being interested in everyday speech acts, he limited his focus to those
statements which represent efforts to make authoritative knowledge
claims. Such statements function as knowledge through exhibiting
regularity and being part of what he called ‘discursive formations’
(Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 77). In analysing discursive formations, he
was focussed on the human sciences and their dynamic relations in larger
historical orders of discourse.
As Nicolini summarises it, a discursive formation

consists of a number of rules that bestow a certain order of the statements

which belong to it. These rules of formation are obtained by assembling in
a novel way existing discursive and non-discursive elements through the
institutions of new social and discursive practices. In particular these rules of
formation and practice determine what can be spoken of, who is allowed
to speak (or write) and how, and a field of possibilities with regards to the
cre- ation of theories and themes; that is, how the discursive formation is
used in the wider institutional and societal arena. (Nicolini 2013: 196)

As Schatzki (2017: 136) argues, Foucault was conscious of the fact

that the sayings that composed the discursive formations always occurred
amid doings and material contexts. However, in his early work he arguably
decided to split the discursive and material dimensions and “took these
sayings, together with what is said in them, as composing distinct entities”
(Schatzki 2017: 136). Nonetheless, it is important to note that Foucault’s
notion of discourse and discursive formation and practice is not limited to
language and sayings. Rather, discourse is a configuration of statements,
rules, norms and technologies. Statements work together with forms of
bodily discipline, training, and normalisation to constitute discursive
formations.
This becomes more visible when Foucault turns to genealogy in his
proj- ect of analysing apparatuses. While Foucault remains committed to
the study of formations of significant extension and proportion, such as
moder- nity, in his genealogical work, he is more explicitly concerned
about mate- riality and contingency. With the concept of ‘apparatus’
(translated from the French dispositif ) Foucault turns to analyses of systems
of relations between various heterogeneous material and linguistic
elements. Apparatus can be
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 47

understood as an open concept that describes a “relatively durable network

of heterogeneous elements (discourses, laws, architectures, institutions,
administrative practices and so on)” (Walters 2012: 36). In this sense,
the concept of apparatus has similar features to those proposed in other
approaches, such as the notion of actor-network or Schatzki’s bundles
and material arrangements.
Foucault’s move to the study of contingency is characterised by his
turn to genealogy, writing histories of the present, as represented in
Discipline and Punish (1977) and A History of Sexuality (1978). With this
method- ological reorientation, Foucault emphasised the importance of
actions and practices, the objective of describing and explaining change
without appealing to overarching principles and instead turning to how
people reinterpret and modify their situations, and that change is the
outcome of contestable processes (Bevir 2010; Koopman 2013).
The guiding term of his genealogy was that of ‘problematisation’. That
is, to study and reconstruct how problems were made in order to find new
ways of dealing with them.2 The objective of a historical reconstruction is,
then, to identify those apparatuses that have been developed to respond
and indeed make a problem and to investigate those contingent moments in
which alter- natives have been excluded. As Koopman (2013: 20) suggests,
problematisa- tion provides a “kind of master concept for Foucault’s
methodology”.
In his 1978 lectures, Foucault turned to the analysis of political knowl-
edge and proposed a set of concepts that have become very influential in
politics and IR. With the concept of governmentality, he proposed a new
way of analysing the exercise of power and political rule. “The term gov-
ernmentality sought to draw attention to a certain way of thinking and
acting embodied in all those attempts to know and govern the wealth,
health and happiness of populations” (Rose and Miller 1992: 174).
Foucault developed the concept to account for a shift in governing he
identifies in sixteenth century Europe, redefining the purpose of rule
from control over territory to the governing of populations. Foucault did
not reduce the notion of government to the state; rather government was
taken to be “the historically constituted matrix within which are articu-
lated all those dreams, schemes, strategies and manoeuvres of authorities
that seek to shape the beliefs and conduct of others in desired directions
by acting upon their will, their circumstances or their environment”
(Rose and Miller 1992: 175). In what soon emerged as a body of research
described as “governmentality studies” (Walters 2012), the goal became
to analyse technologies of government. As Rose and Miller (1992: 183)
set out, the scope of such studies
48 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

is a question of the complex assemblage of diverse forces – legal, architec-

tural, professional, administrative, financial, judgmental – such that
aspects of the decisions and actions of individuals, groups, organisations
and popu- lations come to be understood and regulated in relation to
authoritative criteria. We need to study the humble and mundane
mechanisms by which authorities seek to instantiate government:
techniques of notation, compu- tation and calculation; procedures of
examination and assessment; the invention of devices such as surveys and
presentational forms such as tables; the standardisation of systems for
training and the inculcation of habits; the inauguration of professional
specialisms and vocabularies; building designs and architectural forms – the
list is heterogeneous and in principle unlim- ited. (Rose and Miller 1992:
183)

As Rose and Miller describe it, governmentality studies are wide in

scope and draw on the core commitments of IPT. It is the notion of gov-
ernmentality and the corresponding analysis of technologies of govern-
ment that have most directly influenced the discussion within IPT.
Foucault’s work has been widely accepted in IR, and a burgeoning
body of work engages with Foucauldian concepts. This includes a wide
range of studies taking up the notion of discursive practices, which do
not, however, always engage with the non-discursive side of practices. In
par- ticular, it is those drawing on the concept of governmentality that
have made vital contributions to IPT. As Walters (2012: 83) argues, a
rich field of “international governmentality studies” has emerged.
Those studies that treat governmentality as an analytical toolbox for the
study of technologies of government, rather than an expression of a par-
ticular (neoliberal) style of political rule, 3 have particularly investigated
global governance processes in the fields of development, aid, or political
economy. Sending and Neumann (2006), for instance, show how the role
of NGOs has changed under the new logic or rationality of government in
global governance. By using the cases of the international campaign to
ban landmines and international population policy, they illustrate that
the self-association and political will-formation characteristic of civil
society and nonstate actors do not stand in opposition to the political
power of the state, but are a central feature of how power, understood as
govern- ment, operates in late modern society. Both cases underline that
NGOs are refined from passive objects into an entity that is both an
object and a subject of government. Thus, NGOs are not necessarily a
barrier to gov- ernment, they are themselves part of it. Sending and
Neumann give us an example that reveals how a Foucauldian analysis
challenges taken-for- granted binaries, such as those between the state
and civil society.
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 49

Other researchers have turned to analyse the practices of power of

international organisations.4 Laura Zanotti (2005) critically analyses the
UN debate on democratisation and good governance as a dominating
framework since the 1990s. UN ‘good governance’ discourses and pro-
grammes are read as elements of global governmentality. That is, instead
of asking under which conditions and through what kind of interventions
democratisation can best be achieved, Zanotti (2005: 462) uses the con-
cept of governmentality to explore the conditions of emergence of good
governance as the UN political rationale, the mechanisms of government
it promotes, and the political effects it produces. In her empirical
findings, she illustrates the processes by which, at the United Nations,
the language of governance colonised the discourse on democracy,
peace, and develop- ment, and demonstrates the governmental character of
the mechanisms of government promoted within this approach.
The role of indicators as a tool of governance has become another
focus of governmentality analysis. Oded Lö wenheim (2008), for instance,
employs the notion of governmentality to shed light on the political
mean- ings and outcomes of the increasing tendency to rate and rank the
gover- nance capacities and performances of states. He shows how
various political actors such as the World Bank and the US government
‘responsi- bilise’ developing countries as they construct the examined states
as ethical subjects deemed capable of free and responsible choices and
thereby neglect their own responsible role of reproducing global
injustices and inequalities (Lö wenheim 2008: 256). In the meantime, a
wide range of studies has demonstrated how quantitative tools, such as
indicators, benchmarks or indexes, are major techniques of government
in interna- tional relations permeating all sorts of fields of global
governance.5
The other field in which Foucauldian practice approaches have
become widely adopted is security studies. Here it is the context of the
war on ter- ror that particularly spurred the interest in governmentality.
EU counter-terrorism is a good example. Usually, EU counter-
terrorism is regarded as a response to the growing threat of terrorism. Stef
Wittendorp (2016) analyses three technologies in counter-terrorism (the
action plan, the timetable, and the Counter-Terrorist Coordinator)
designed for shap- ing the conduct of government. However, as he
demonstrates, these tech- nologies are implicated in the (re)production
of insecurity rather than locating the source of insecurity external to
these institutions, as institu- tionalist accounts do. This mode of
governing therefore fuels a circular logic whereby the need to perform
better leads to calls for improved
50 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

monitoring and vice versa. The concept of governmentality also sheds new
light on EU security policy, in particular on its common security and
defence policy (CSDP). Whereas CSDP is often analysed as a site of and
contributor to processes of securitisation, Michael Merlingen (2011)
applies the conceptual tools of governmentality theory to show the dynam-
ics and functioning of internal and external CSDP governance in post-
conflict societies. Andreas Vasilache’s (2014) study on the changing US
security policy under the Obama administration is a good example of
using one crucial strategy document. The new strategic guidance for the
Department of Defense entitled ‘Sustaining US Global Leadership:
Priorities for the 21st Century Defense’ involves, as he shows in his
analy- sis, two different security approaches that follow different logics
in US history. For Vasilache (2014: 584), the guidance is remarkable
because of the distinctiveness, immediacy, and clarity with which both
sovereign security logics in the tradition of great power politics and
governmental security logics are introduced, presented, and dialectically
joined – pre- cisely by not merging or bringing them together in a direct
and explicit manner. By providing a governmental reading, he shows that
such a docu- ment is an interesting and politically weighty
demonstration and example of a separating but parallelised configuration
of sovereign and governmen- tal rationalities in US military policy.
Foucauldian concepts are important tools in the spectrum of IPT. It is
not only his understanding of discourse with its emphasis on the
material and heterogeneous nature of practices and order, and the way it
fore- grounds the centrality of discursive practices and power
phenomena that provides an important bridge between textualist and
practice accounts. Concepts such as apparatus, problematisation and
governmentality bring the contingency of practice to the fore.
As Nicolini summarises it, Foucault “has the merit of emphasising that
the appropriate units of inquiry for practice theories are not unique, coher-
ent, and stable objects, as much as emergent nexuses of local diversities.
For Foucault in fact the unity of discourse does not lie in repetition of the
same activity […] as much as in the delimitation of diversity” (Nicolini
2013: 198).
It remains puzzling why Foucauldian forms of analysis have not been
interpreted as an important contributor to the practice theoretical
trading zone more frequently. One answer to the puzzle is certainly the
complexity of Foucault’s writing and the different paths and
interpretations it allows. Another is the particular focus on grand shifts
and large-scale histories he
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 51

invites us to take, which seem to run counter to the intention of many

practice turners to seek their fortune in the smaller scale.
Indeed, engaging with the Foucauldian approach produces the risk
that one does not read it as an invitation to study the intricacies of the
material and linguistic relations of concrete apparatuses and the practices of
power, but favours – contrary to the intention of much of Foucault’s
writing – grand narratives over the empirical study of practices. As Bevir
(2010: 431) notes, studies of governmentality, in particular, can then
slide into structuralism in that they “lose sight of the fact that people
create mean- ings and practices” and start to “treat meanings as things
that exist as part of systems of signs quite apart from the actors who
make them”.

3.3 COMMUNITIEs OF PRaCTICE

The community of practice approach (hereafter CPA) was developed in
organisational sociology and management studies, being proposed and
outlined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. The core question that
Wenger and Lave addressed was how learning processes unfold, and
how they can be facilitated. Working in a typical 1980s Silicon Valley
laboratory, Lave and Wenger wanted to know how humans learn how to
use machines, and how human-machine interaction and processes of
‘learning to learn’ could be improved. If Lave and Wenger’s co-authored
book Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation was
principally concerned with learn- ing, Wenger’s later single-author study
Communities of Practice Learning, Meaning and Identity (1998)
developed these insights into a broader social theoretical account that
goes far beyond these initial concerns. Since the publication of these books,
CPA has travelled widely across disciplines and become a mainstream
framework in, notably, education studies, man- agement theory and
organisational sociology.
In IR, the framework was first introduced by Emanuel Adler in his
introduction to Communitarian International Relations (2005), where he
suggested it to be a productive reconceptualisation of prevailing
concepts of ‘community’, providing promising routes to address core
theoretical questions of IR, such as the relation between actors and
structures, identity or change. Since Adler proposed it, the phrase
‘communities of practice’ has become widely used in IR. Many use the
concept only in a loose sense, however.6 Direct translations of Wenger’s
approach to IR concerns are yet more limited. CPA nonetheless gained a
strong foothold in the study of security, particularly in infusing the
concept of security communities with
52 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

practice theoretical ideas, but also in study of the practices of

bureaucracy, international law, diplomacy, peacebuilding, terrorism, and
piracy.
Two ideas are central in CPA: firstly, that learning is a core mechanism
of practice by which knowing and doing become related, and, secondly,
that practice is organised in community structures. CPA offers a sophisti-
cated outline of how such communities function, how they interact and
how they can be studied as well as facilitated. In the following, we firstly
introduce the core concepts and strategies of CPA and, secondly, review
how these have been employed in IR. We conclude with a critical reflec-
tion of the limits of the approach.
Lave and Wenger developed their account through a critique of cogni-
tive understandings of learning that emphasise the mental processes of
individuals. CPA hence positions itself most directly in relation to
mental- ist accounts of culturalist theorising. As summarised by Alison
Fuller (2007), this entailed three core elements. Firstly, CPA promotes
collec- tives and groups as the core unit of analysis. Learning, therefore,
is pivot- ally a social relation to others. Secondly, learning evolves through
practice, that is, the co-participation of people in the shared practices of
their com- munity. Individuals form and are formed by these collectives.
Thirdly, the question of what is learned is answered by Lave and Wenger
in terms of identity formation.
Learning, then, is the process by which one becomes a full member
and knowledgeable and skilled practitioner within a community. Lave
and Wenger (1991) captured the process of learning with the concept of
“legit- imate peripheral participation”. The term highlights the
progressive par- ticipation of newcomers to a community whereby they
gain the practical competency to participate and become members. The
notion of ‘periph- eral’ implies that there are certain social positions
within a collective. New members do not necessarily have to take a certain
route to become increas- ingly competent practitioners, as through their
and others’ participation they might also change what counts as
legitimate knowledge. The notion of legitimate peripheral participation
therefore also emphasises that learn- ing is not a straightforward process.
In activities of participation, meanings and understandings and what
counts as relevant and legitimate knowledge might change quite
fundamentally. With this emphasis, the community of practice approach
integrates an aspect that is less prominent in other frame- works, the
integration of individuals in practical contexts and the emer- gence of
new practices. Actors become members of a community of practice though
learning its respective practices. Learning is understood here as
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 53

practical learning and as socialisation into the legitimate forms of action

of a community. Any community of practice is produced by and re-
produced in a collective process of learning.
In Communities of Practice Learning, Meaning and Identity, Wenger
(1998) generalises the idea of community of practices as an organisation
theory. Lave and Wenger conceptualised community in weak terms, sug-
gesting that the term does not reflect an entity that shares culture or a
clearly identifiable social group with set boundaries (Lave and Wenger
1991: 98). Wenger (1998) shifts this emphasis; in his reworking of the
notion, communities become established as a container of practice with
clearly identifiable boundaries and recognisable social coherence. He
sug- gests that communities of practice are a distinct social entity, and
proposes studying organisations as composed of such communities.
Organisations should, therefore, not only be projected as formal
structures and units, but also as informal ones. They host a wide variety
of communities that are the main source of identity, within which
meaning is negotiated, and knowledge is created and shared.
Wenger understands communities of practice as units of analysis that
cut across formal organisations, institutions, and other forms of associa-
tion such as social movements. It is, simply put, a set of relations among
people doing things together (Wenger 1998). In Wenger and Snyder
(2000: 139), communities of practice are identified as “a new organisa-
tional form”, that are “groups of people informally bound together by
shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise”.
Following Wenger, a community of practice entails a set of relations in
three dimensions by which practice is the source of coherence: ‘mutual
engagement’, a ‘joint enterprise’ and a ‘shared repertoire’. A community
is given coherence by practice, firstly, when “people are engaged in actions
whose meanings they negotiate with one another” (Wenger 1998: 73).
A community of practice is not a simple aggregate of people that share
some characteristic, such as having a title, or knowing other people. It is
people who engage with each other. “They work together, […] they talk
with each other all the time, exchange information and opinions, and
very directly influence each other’s understanding as a matter of
routine” (Wenger 1998: 75). Such a mutual engagement, a working
together, cre- ates a unique set of relationships between members of a
community.
Secondly, communities of practice negotiate a joint enterprise. Members
respond communally to situations and deliberate what their enterprise is
constituted by. Joint enterprises also give rise to regimes of mutual account-
ability. These include “what matters and what not, […], what to do and
54 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

what not, what to pay attention to and what not […], what to justify and
what to take for granted, […] when actions and artefacts are good enough
and when they need improvement or refinement” (Wenger 1998: 81).
Thirdly, communities of practice develop a shared repertoire used in
practice. Such a repertoire includes “routines, words, tools, ways of doing
things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions, or concepts that the
community has produced or adopted in the course of its existence and
which have become part of its practice” (Wenger 1998: 83).
Communities of practice are, then, containers of practice characterised
by mutual engagement, joint enterprises, and a shared repertoire.
Equipped with such an understanding of community as a “well-
identifiable social ‘thing’” connoted by detectable boundaries and speci-
fiable characteristics (Nicolini 2013: 19), Wenger also addresses how
communities relate to and interact with each other as well as how they
can be facilitated. He stresses that communities establish relations by
dif- ferent sorts of boundary practices. Communities might engage and
share so-called “boundary objects”, that is, objects used in more than one
com- munity, although these do not agree on the meaning of the object. A
for- est in which conservationists, joggers and loggers meet might be
such a boundary object, as might the coffee machine in an office building
where different communities of an organisation converge.
Another form of interaction is through ‘multiple participation’ and
‘brokering’. People usually participate in more than one community, yet
only brokers are able to make connections between communities.
Brokering involves the translation of knowledge from one community to
the other and the aligning of perspectives. If a broker brings in new
knowl- edge or objects to the community, then they need to be
assimilated into it. It may become a natural part of the community’s
repertoire, or it may be rejected. Wenger also elaborates ways by which
communities can be built and learning facilitated to the benefit of an
organisation. Particularly in his later works, he lays out how targeted
provision of resources and opportu- nity might improve dialogue and
communication in order to facilitate learning. In the words of Wenger
and Snyder (2000: 140), “communities of practice can drive strategy,
generate new lines of business, solve prob- lems, promote the spread of
best practices, develop people’s professional skills, and help companies
to recruit and retain talent”.
Given that CPA elaborates practice-theoretical viewpoints on core con-
cepts of IR, such as learning, identity and community, CPA provides a
rich repertoire for studying international practice. In IR, Adler has
spearheaded the translation of Wenger’s concept. In his 2005 book, he
suggests that CPA
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 55

can provide “a unifying and comprehensive way of understanding the role

of transnational communities in International Relations” (Adler 2005: 3).
He consequently invites us to reinterpret received notions of community
in IR, including ‘security communities’, which “practice peaceful change”
(Adler 2005: 17), ‘epistemic communities’, which engage in knowledge
validation and as science-based communities “construct the practices,
iden- tities, and interests of modern rulers” (Adler 2005: 17), ‘critical
communi- ties’, which propose alternative knowledge, ‘global public
policy networks’ as well as ‘transnational advocacy networks’. All of these
are communities “because of what they do” (Adler 2005: 17).
For Adler, the main advantage of such an interpretation lies in the
potential dialogue between normative and analytical communitarian
approaches, as well in CPA’s productive responses to IR’s core
ontological puzzles. According to him (2005: 14 f.), CPA offers an
understanding of community that goes beyond IR’s norm-oriented
approaches. The learn- ing process that CPA describes not only involves
the acquisition of knowl- edge to perform a distinct activity, but also
moral commitments and evaluative standards of excellence, which imply
ethics or a set of values. CPA moreover offers a dynamic concept, which
is able to project the agency as well as the structural side of practice.
“Communities of practice cut across state-boundaries and mediate
between states, individuals, and human agency, on one hand, and social
structures and systems, on the other” (Adler 2005: 15). In his later work
co-authored with Vincent Pouliot, CPA becomes a cornerstone of his pro-
posal for IPT. Citing Wenger at length, Adler and Pouliot propose that the
general ideas of practice theory can be turned into “concrete and workable
theoretical meaning in the concept of communities of practice. […]
Practices develop, diffuse, and become institutionalized in such collec-
tives” (Adler and Pouliot 2011a: 18). They suggest that communities are
an intelligible focal point for IR research, since core ontological dimen-
sions intersect. As they argue:

The community of practice concept encompasses not only the conscious

and discursive dimensions, and the actual doing of social change, but also
the social space where structure and agency overlap and where
knowledge, power, and community intersect. Communities of practice are
intersubjec- tive social structures that constitute the normative and epistemic
ground for action, but they also are agents, made up of real people, who –
working via network channels, across national borders, across organisational
divides, and in the halls of government – affect political, economic, and
social events. (Adler and Pouliot 2011a: 18–19)
56 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

With the plea to turn communities of practice into a focal point of IR

research, Adler opened up a rich practice-theoretical agenda. How CPA
can be used to shed light on core questions of IR is demonstrated in
Adler’s work on security communities and a range of studies further devel-
oping this work. In two articles, one co-authored with Patricia Greve, he
substantiates how security communities can be re-interpreted as commu-
nities of practice (Adler 2008; Adler and Greve 2009). Adler and Greve
describe a security community as a distinct mechanism of security gover-
nance; if it is at work, “power does not trigger balancing behaviour”
(Adler and Greve 2009: 70), instead alliances and alignments “are rooted
in mutual trust and collective identity” (Adler and Greve 2009: 71).
Drawing on CPA, Adler (2008; Adler and Greve 2009) suggests that
security communities are characterised by a repertoire of at least six dis-
tinct practices: the practice of self-restraint, the practice of directing
com- mon enterprises, projects and partnerships, cooperative security
practice, diplomacy as the normal practice, a disposition of spreading the
commu- nity outward through socialisation mechanisms and teaching,
and more specific practices of military planning, of confidence building,
and of pol- icy coordination. This provides a profound reinterpretation,
and directs the study of security communities from understandings of
identity as beliefs, expectations or perceptions to ones based in practice.
The concept is therefore suitable for investigating processes of
enlargement (such as NATO enlargement, see Adler 2008), as well as
studying the geographical spread and extension of practices, such as
democratic ones.
As shown in other works, such a reinterpretation also allows for inte-
grating insights from securitisation theory into security community the-
ory. Shared practices of turning an issue into a threat (securitisation)
and shared securitisations can be seen as forming a core part of the
repertoire of a security community (Bueger 2013b; Bueger and
Stockbruegger 2012). Niklas Bremberg (2015) demonstrated how
shared securitisation practices coupled with cooperative tools such as the
institutionalisation of multilateral venues, transgovernmental networks or
joint crisis manage- ment infrastructures, provide an understanding of how
security communi- ties spread their practices and hence grow at their
boundaries.
If CPA has principally been used to advance the notion of security
com- munity so far, applications of Wenger’s framework go far beyond
this. This particularly concerns research on regional organisations, such
as the European Union, as well as in the field of international law.
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 57

Heavily influenced by Adler’s work on security communities of

practice within European Union studies, CPA has particularly been
employed in investigating how common European structures emerge in
the field of foreign and security policy. In a series of studies, Frederica
Bicchi investi- gated how European bodies evolve by forming
communities of practice. Using CPA as a framework to study the
communication and knowledge production of diplomats in Europe’s new
External Action Service, Bicchi (2011) asks whether a community is
emerging, or investigates the perfor- mance of Europe by diplomats in
the Jerusalem area (2016). Zwolski (2016) investigates how early
warning systems lead to the emergence of a European community of
practice. Nina Graeger (2016) demonstrates how CPA can be fruitfully
used to explore the collaboration between regional organisations by
studying the relations between the EU and NATO. Maren Hofius (2016)
investigated how EU diplomats both span as well as draw the boundary
of a European community of practice, while Matthew Davies (2016) has
shown how a distinct style of diplomacy has started to emerge in an
ASEAN community of practice.
In the field of international law, CPA was introduced by Jutta Brunnée
and Stephen J Toope (2010, 2011). They argue for understanding inter-
national law as emerging from and embedded in a legal community of
practice that is composed of shared understandings, criteria of legality and
a practice of legality. This community creates legal obligation. Following
their work, others have investigated the emergence of a community of
human rights practice (Orange 2016), as well as a community of fact
find- ing (Heaven 2017).
CPA has also been introduced as a productive tool outside the study of
international law and bureaucratic regional organisations. Michael
Christensen (2017) argues that international democracy assistance activi-
ties can be seen as being organised in emerging transnational communities
of practice. Bueger (2013a) analyses Somali piracy as a community of
practice, arguing that CPA provides a fuller understanding of the
phenom- enon in contrast to prevalent conceptualisations of piracy as
interaction between rational criminal individuals. Michael Kenney
(2017) demon- strates how CPA’s account of learning can provide an
understanding of the adaptation of terrorist and transnational crime
organisations.
Using communities of practice as a focal point and studying world
poli- tics as a collection of these focal points promises further interesting
insights.7 CPA provides a rich analytical vocabulary, however existing
studies have not made full use of the diverse concepts. Potential further
58 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

studies will have to make better use of the concept of legitimate

peripheral participation and study the manifold socialisation processes
in interna- tional practices; CPA’s rich set of terms also provides entry
points for researching the interaction between communities of practices;
finally, drawing on CPA might also produce policy recommendations on
how communities can be facilitated.
CPA has been subject to considerable criticism, however. Notably, the
stronger version as elaborated in Wenger’s more recent work and as
adopted by Adler raises concerns for the applicability of CPA in an IR
context. A first line of criticism concerns whether CPA can be meaning-
fully applied to the transnational collectives IR is concerned with. Wenger’s
concept of communities primarily has organisation-based communities
in mind, and one of the core criteria of a community is an intense
everyday form of engagement of the members. A community in this
sense involves a limited number of people, who are to some extent
geographically bound. While diplomats in a distinct capital can be said to
form such a community, for instance, it is questionable if a collective
such as Western diplomats could be studied within the same
frameworks.
Adler suggests that “Wenger […] has dealt mainly with domestic or
national communities of practice. There is no reason, however, why we
should not be able to identify transnational or even global communities
of practice” (Adler 2005: 15). This not only raises the question of
whether there might be a difference between a small local and a large
transnational group (Roberts 2006: 630), it also remains unclear how
communities are nested in each other, how smaller and larger
communities relate, and how communities relate to a context that they
are part of. Brown and Duguid (2001), for instance, suggest that the
concept of communities of practice should only refer to smaller local
groups characterised by an intense level of engagement, while they
prefer to speak of “networks of practice” (Brown and Duguid 2001: 205)
to refer to larger and looser constella- tions of practice.
A second major line of critique, emphasised by Fox (2000), Mork et al.
(2010), Marshall and Rollinson (2004), and Contu and Willmott (2003)
concerns the silence of CPA towards questions of power and hierarchy.
This relates to the character of hierarchies and policing mechanisms within
communities of practice. As Marshall and Rollinson (2004: 74) remark,
in CPA the negotiation of meaning can be easily misinterpreted as “exces-
sively quiescent and consensual”. However, such negotiations might be
characterised by disagreements and controversies, some of which might
largely be settled by power mechanisms.
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 59

Considerations of power are also important in addressing the issue of

the change of practice within a community (Mork et al. 2010; Fox 2000).
Since communities naturalise practices and objects, they not only learn,
but also forget, and might be resistant to outside change due to powerful
predispositions being held (Mork et al. 2000; Mutch 2003). CPA has,
moreover, neglected the question of the distribution of power between
communities of practice and the role of any external context in it. While
Wenger has appropriated the question of boundary relations between
communities, the way power effects impact this relation has not been
conceptualised or studied so far.
The most fundamental critique, however, concerns the use of the con-
cept of community and juxtaposing it with practice. As Nicolini points
out at length, combining the two terms is risky. “[C]ommunity is a term
with a long, and somewhat troublesome meaning” (Nicolini 2013: 88),
and it is often its romanticised image that has “come to represent social
scien- tists’ idealised form of sociality” (Nicolini 2013: 89). Such
emphasis easily slips from practice to community. This is fraught with
risks: “once we couple the notion of practice with a ‘stronger’, more
entrenched notion, such as community, the former tends to lose its main
processural, social temporary, and conflictual character” (Nicolini 2013:
92)
A key advantage of Adler’s proposal to centre IPT on CPA is its ability
to easily build bridges to constructivist works in IR. However, this also
represents an inherent danger that core ideas of practice theory become
lost, including the idea that collectives are formed in and through prac-
tices and not by like-mindedness or shared beliefs or ideas. CPA
therefore opens productive avenues, but relying on communities of
practice as the focal point puts the analyst at constant risk of falling into
a “static and ahistorical view of practice, one in which perpetuation
prevails over change, and the associations between humans overshadow
the inherent materiality of all practices” (Nicolini 2013: 94).

3.4 THEODORE sCHaTZKI’s ONTOLOGY OF PRaCTICEs

In the spectrum of practice approaches, Theodore Schatzki’s account is
most philosophically grounded. He received acclaim in social philosophy for
his book Social Practices, in which he suggests a Wittgensteinian
approach for a better understanding of social phenomena and human
activity (Schatzki 1996). From the outset, Schatzki’s core claim has been
that individuals, their actions, and thoughts cannot be understood
separately from the social
60 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

practices in which they are situated. Schatzki’s practice approach builds

upon a specific view of human action derived from the work of Wittgenstein
(and Heidegger). Inspired by these thinkers, he emphasises the relationship
between human action and social order, and understands humans as neither
serial rational decision makers nor as cultural/rule/habitus dopes, leading
him to focus instead on the conditions of “action intelligibility” (Nicolini
2013: 163).
As the lead editor of the volume Practice Turn (Schatzki et al. 2001),
he has become a well-known practice theorist in various disciplines, and
set the research agenda by stressing the need to overcome single action.
In Practice Turn he submits that “practices are arrays of human activity”
and suggests that “practice accounts are joined in the belief that such
phenom- ena as knowledge, meaning, human activity, science, power,
language, social institutions, and historical transformation occur within
and are aspects or components of the field of practices” (Schatzki 2001: 2,
emphasis in original).
Schatzki defines practices “as temporally unfolding and spatially dis-
persed nexus of doings and sayings” (Schatzki 1996: 89), a definition that
has substantially influenced the practice debate in IR and elsewhere.
This understanding stresses the close link between doing and saying, and
there- fore gives equal importance to bodily actions and speech acts. For
Schatzki (2002: 72), the point of the qualifiers ‘open, temporally
unfolding’ is that “fresh actions are continually perpetuating” and
extending practices tem- porally. In his “primer on practices” Schatzki
(2012: 13), summarises what for him is the essence of practice theory
and highlights how a prac- tice is an “organised constellation of
different people’s activities”. However, it would be misleading to reduce
Schatzki’s sophisticated approach to issues of definition. His major aim,
in particular in his later book (Schatzki 2002), is to conceptualise the
notion of practices in rela- tion to social order and change. This makes
his account promising for IR scholars working on related questions with
regards to international poli- tics. Moreover, his focus on the “mesh of
practices and orders” as the “site where social life takes place” (Schatzki
2002: 123) develops a complex structural notion comparable to terms
such as ‘assemblage’ or ‘actor-net- work’. Finally, his suggestion of a
social ontology centred on practices opens further avenues in IR theory,
moving the debate closer to philo- sophical discussions on the role of
(human) agency, the normativity of practice, and the constitution of
social life and change.
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 61

In Wittgenstein’s understanding of practices as language-games, dif-

ferent elements are closely connected. These include background knowl-
edge, practical understandings, routinisation, and situated learning.
Following Wittgenstein, practices are understood as patterns of activity;
these patterns include action, equipment, sites of activity and are never
precisely and finely demarcated (Stern 2003: 195). Schatzki (2002: 71)
departs from Wittgensteinian thought, however, arguing that a practice
is a bundle of activities; in other words, it is an organised nexus of
actions. Accordingly, any practice embraces two overall dimensions:
activity and organisation. Schatzki’s complete account is centred on the
question of how practices are organised. He distinguishes between
‘dispersed’ and ‘integrative’ practices. While dispersed practices are basic
units and refer to examples such as describing, explaining, and
evaluating, integrative practices are “the more complex practices found
in and constitutive of particular domains of social life” such as cooking or
farming practices (Schatzki 1996: 98).
Understanding practices as sets of doings and sayings means not fore-
going one (bodily action) or the other (language) when analysing prac-
tices. For Schatzki, doings and sayings are composed of increasingly
social wholes that he describes as tasks and projects. That is, a practice
almost always constitutes further actions in the context in which they
are per- formed. The set of actions that composes a practice is broader
than its doings and sayings alone. Writing a research paper on practice
theory, for instance, is a project, which involves many different tasks of
doings and sayings (reading, writing, discussing the argument with
others, concen- trating for a period), but is also embedded in other
projects (participating at conferences, getting published, convincing
others to read the text). Doings, sayings, tasks and projects hang together
in accordance with a characteristic and meaningful organisation. They
constitute integral and meaningful ‘blocks’, described as practices.
For Schatzki (2002: 77) practices are, more specifically, organised
bun- dles of human activities linked through a collection of ‘practical
under- standings’, ‘rules’, ‘teleo-affective structures’, and ‘general
understandings’. Together, they form the organisation of practices. Each
of these concepts is further discussed below.
Firstly, ‘practical understandings’ are certain abilities that pertain to
the actions constituting a practice. Practical understanding refers to the
knowing that derives from being competent within a practice. Following
Wittgenstein, knowing manifests itself as being able to proceed unhampered
62 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

in an activity. To say that two sets of doings and sayings are linked by the
same practical understanding means that they express the same understand-
ing of what is going on, making the action of one person intelligible to
another when both members are competent within that practice (Nicolini
2013: 165). Mutual intelligibility refers to Wittgenstein’s notion of
regular- ity in action in the sense of family resemblance, as participants
can disagree within a practice while still understanding each other. For
Schatzki (2002: 78–79), practical understanding resembles the concept
of habitus, in that it is a skill or capacity that underlies activity.
Secondly, rules are another way by which practices are kept together.
For Schatzki (2002: 79), rules are “explicit formulations, principles, pre-
cepts, and instructions that enjoin, direct or remonstrate people to per-
form specific actions”. To say that rules link doings and sayings is to say
that people, in carrying out these doings and sayings, take account of and
adhere to the same rules. This notion implies that rules as programmes
of action are not tacit or implicit formulas, but rather formulations inter-
jected into social life for the purpose of orienting and determining the
course of activity, typically by those with the authority to enforce them
(Schatzki 2002: 80).
Thirdly, the link between the doings and sayings of a practice is also
provided through a teleo-affective structure. Schatzki (2002: 80) defines
it as “a range of normativised and hierarchically ordered ends, projects,
and tasks, to varying degrees allied with normativised emotions and
even moods”. It emphasises that all practices unfold according to a
specific direction and ‘oughtness’ or ‘how they should be carried out’.
This con- cept follows the thinking of Heidegger, who saw purposiveness
as one of the most basic conditions of being human (Nicolini 2013: 166).
Thus, a practice always exhibits a set of ends that participants should or
may pursue; a range of projects that they should or may carry out for the
sake of these ends; and a selection of tasks that they should or may
perform for the sake of these projects (Schatzki 2002: 80). The teleo-
affective struc- ture therefore emphasises the normativity of practice.
Teleo-affective structures also involve a set of emotions and moods
that connote ends and project affectively, for instance, a researcher feels
happy once her paper is accepted for publication. This internal structure
and affective colouring of a practice is part of the learning process by
which individuals turn into participants within a language-game.
However, as Nicolini (2013: 166–167) explains, this learning process
implies a strong normative flavour that gives the impression that the
structure of practice is
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 63

what guides action. This is, however, not the case, as activity is always
gov- erned by practical intelligibility – “the teleo-affective structure only
con- tributes by shaping what it makes sense to do”. The teleo-affective
structure is upheld in a distributed manner by all participants, whereby it
is learned and perpetuated through the socialisation of novices within
the practice. It also points to normative controversy as “the teleoaffective
structure is indefinitely complex” (Schatzki 2002: 83), since participants
will never totally agree on which ends, projects, tasks, and emotions are
obligatory or acceptable in a practice.
Fourthly, the activities of a practice hang together through a set of
gen- eral understandings. They are reflexive understandings of the overall
proj- ect in which people are involved, and which contribute to practical
intelligibility and hence action (Nicolini 2013: 167). The general under-
standing of the project gives the practice its identity, both discursively
and practically.
In sum, a practice is a temporally evolving, open-ended set of doings
and sayings linked by practical understandings, rules, teleo-affective
structure, and general understandings. For Schatzki (2002: 87), it is
important that the organisation of a practice describes the practice’s
fron- tiers, as it clarifies, on the one hand, that a doing or saying belongs
to a given practice if it expresses components of that practice’s
organisation; on the other hand, this delineation of boundaries entails
that practices can overlap, and that a particular doing might belong to
two or more practices.
Following this conceptual vocabulary, Schatzki (2002) develops his
complex ‘site ontology’ by describing step by step how practices
establish arrangements and social orders by emphasising dimensions of
relationality, meanings, identity, and objects. He draws on metaphors
such as ‘mesh’, ‘shifting’, ‘multiple’, and ‘interweaving’ to avoid
structuralist notions. He criticises, for instance, Bourdieu for drawing the
site of the social as an array of homologous bounded realms of activity,
meaning, and arrange- ment into “large-scale united parcels” (Schatzki
2002: 152). Finally, for Schatzki (2002: 240), practice organisations are
never static, as the under- standings, rules, and teleo-affective structures
that organise integrative practices frequently change in what is
described as “reorganisation” and “recomposition”.
Schatzki develops his account with reference to two guiding historical
cases: the medicinal herb business of a Shaker village in the 1850s, and
con- temporary day trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. In doing so,
Schatzki
64 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

uses the relative simplicity of Shaker life to illustrate basic features of his site
ontology, for instance when he describes the crucially practical understand-
ings of medicinal herb practices as “grinding, macerating, drying, storing,
mixing, labelling, feeding, and printing labels” (Schatzki 2002: 78–79).
The case of stock market trading practices is used to think about
agency and change. Although the way Schatzki integrates the material
dimension of practice resembles approaches such as actor-network theory,
he reserves the notion of practice and agency to humans, and hence argues
for working with two terms, practice and material arrangements. The notion
of human agency, therefore, remains important. As Schatzki (2002: 209)
states: “An actor is not, however, its embedding arrangements: A trader
is not his computer, workstation, fellow traders, and managers, just as the
day trading office is not the firm, the market-making industry, and the
Nasdaq market.”
Moreover, “traders can act without their computers and fellows, just
as the office can carry on in the absence of other offices (though it cannot
in the absence of the Nasdaq market)”. Schatzki (2002: 209) therefore
develops a notion of agency as an “effect” of embedding arrangements.
While agency requires certain general types of embedding networks (e.g.
physical things) to act on, components of embedding arrangements can
also lead to human action that Schatzki (2002: 209) regards as causal.
Furthermore, embedding networks can also prefigure agency. For
example, without their computers it is difficult for traders to follow market
activity, though it is still easy for them to bemoan repair delays. As the
example shows, Schatzki puts emphasis on agency as the remaining
capac- ity of human action; similarly, he recognises the interwoven
character of practices in complex arrangements, which transforms the
space for agency in its traditional sense. Finally, Schatzki does not equate
agency with change. For him, constant doing must not be equated with
change, as many human and non-human doings maintain the practice-
order mesh.
Schatzki’s site theory – despite some empirical illustrations – is less
empirically informed than other approaches. It therefore does not lend
itself easily as a framework for empirical research. IR scholars have used his
work to both support theoretical arguments and describe empirical phe-
nomena around international practices.
Cornelia Navari (2010), for instance, draws on Schatzki to identify and
discuss the concept of practice that has been developed in the English
school of IR. Following Navari (2010: 613), the English school concept of
a practice has many parallels to that of Schatzki, since it is a purposive goal-
oriented conception. Although most English school theorists “may not
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 65

even know Schatzki’s name”, Navari (2010: 616) argues that Schatzki’s
notion of practice most resembles the English school in its aims and
struc- ture, and is therefore a valuable aid to understanding that
conception. For Navari (2010: 615), the English school agrees in the
assumption that prac- tice is not a private idea, but instead “a
commitment to communal stan- dards is required for one to talk
meaningfully of a practice”.
Navari (2010: 616) finds the analytical distinction between dispersed
and integrative practices particularly helpful. She makes use of his sugges-
tion of the requisite elements of a practice, thereby giving the concept its
empirical grounding. Navari discusses an English school study by Keens-
Soper (1978) to illustrate how Schatzki’s practice account might be used.
Keens-Soper (1978) shows how the balance of power emerged as a new
practice. The basis is a historical reconstruction of the changing political
order in Europe starting with a letter written in 1458 by Pope Pius II to
Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, and ending with the
Treaty of Utrecht that ended the War of the Spanish Succession. As
Navari (2010: 619) argues, the new practice of balance of power
inscribed in the treaty conforms with all the requirements of a practice
as understood by Schatzki: a clear understanding of how to prompt and
respond to balances of power had emerged; it had a rule or standard – to
counter those with hegemonic ambition, and the practice had a teleo-
affective structure, namely the goal of protecting liberty. For Navari,
there are various links between Schatzki and the English school; for
instance, she suggests that Hedley Bull’s concept of an ‘institution’ is
almost identical to Schatzki’s conception of practice (Navari 2010: 620).
Another example of a translation of Schatzkian vocabulary in IR is
Janice Bially-Mattern’s (2011) sketch of “a practice theory of emotion for
IR”. Bially-Mattern (2011: 64) describes emotions as practices that are
distinct to other forms of action, being conceptually and analytically irre-
ducible to more elementary, constitutive forces. She thereby argues against
simplifying the phenomenon and assuming emotion as a product of
either/or types of causal forces in terms of explanation. The claim that
practice rests on a unique ontology, however, can be interpreted differ-
ently. She criticises Adler and Pouliot (2011a, b, c) for taking a position
“that practice is ‘suspended’ between structure and agency, materiality
and sociality”, which implies that “practice is not possible without all
four components of social life” (Bially-Mattern 2011: 70–71).
Bially-Mattern (2011: 72, 75) follows Schatzki by arguing that “agency
is a result of practice rather than its source”, and that “practice is a com-
ponent of social life in its own right”. She uses these insights to develop
66 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

her conceptualisation of taking emotion as an expressive social practice.

That is, emotional ways of being become socially intelligible as bodies
competently perform the techniques that bring them into being.
Competent performances are things that people do, and they are learned
through social engagements (Bially-Mattern 2011: 77). Fear, for instance,
is an emotion a human being learns to experience, understand, and
recog- nise on many levels (biological, cultural); emotions are therefore
“not just doings; they are competent ones”. Thus, emotion is not
understood as an internal, subjective experience, but rather as an
external, intersubjective one. As practices, emotions are as much public
as they are private. “They happen, as it were, across levels of analysis”
(Bially-Mattern 2011: 79).
In sum, Bially-Mattern’s notion of emotional practices suggests under-
standing them as socially meaningful, competent bodily performances that
simultaneously constitute and express one’s experience of being, generate
human social order, and create the agency that transforms it. For her, the
major promise of a Schatzki-inspired practice perspective is that “it encour-
ages theories and methods for IR research that embrace, rather than
assume away, the complexity of emotion” (Bially-Mattern 2011: 81). As
Bially-Mattern (2011: 84) summarises, “the key to analysing emotional
practices in world politics is to focus on the competent performances
that, in the moment of their enactment, express how the ‘doer’ is
experiencing her own existence as a being in the human world”. Whereas
emotions are often treated as an issue of impact in IR, Bially-Mattern
(and Schatzki) demonstrate that it is more interesting to address how
emotional practices matter in world politics.
Schatzki’s sophisticated practice account is primarily useful in theo-
retical terms by providing practice-oriented scholars with guidance on
the organisation and complex arrangement of practices as bundles of
activities. Many IR scholars use Schatzki’s conceptual work to explain
the difference and added value of a practice-oriented perspective in spe-
cific issue areas such as EU diplomacy (Bicchi and Bremberg 2016), or
global environmental change (Spaargaren 2011). In the latter, Schatzki’s
account is regarded as particularly helpful in bridging the divide
between agency, structure, and technology, in that he provides
conceptual lan- guage that emphasises the symmetry and relatedness of
the three concepts (Spaargaren 2011: 817). His definition of practice also
concep- tualises difficult issues such as the normativity of practice by
integrating the element of teleo-affective structures.
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY I 67

To some degree, Schatzki develops a middle ground between the

more structuralist, human-focused approaches of Giddens and Bourdieu
and the more radical posthuman versions of practice theory developed,
for instance, in actor-network theory. Schatzki is, however, first and
foremost a social philosopher who translates Wittgensteinian and
Heideggerian phi- losophy into a practice ontology that considers
contemporary debates on agency, materiality, and the distinction
between society and nature.
For Schatzki, his practice account also has implications for empirical
research as he attempts to translate it into organisational research (Schatzki
2005). Following him (2005: 476), one central task in comprehending an
organisation is identifying the actions that compose it. A second key task
is identifying practice-arrangement bundle(s) in which these actions take
part as well as discovering where these bundles cohere or compete. A
final task is identifying other nets of practice-arrangement bundles to which
the net composing the organisation is closely tied. Although he also
makes concrete methodological suggestions such as the requirement of
‘partici- pant observation’, which involves “watching participants’
activities, inter- acting with them (e.g. asking questions), and – at least
ideally – attempting to learn their practices” (Schatzki 2005: 476), the
major value of Schatzki’s account lies in its high potential to sensitise
further theorisation and con- ceptualisation in vocabularies from other
disciplines.
Although Schatzki’s ambitious site theory provides powerful method-
ological tools with which to sensitise empirical observation and theorisa-
tion, these are so prescriptive and imprecise, that “they risk hampering,
instead of facilitating, the work of empirical social researchers”, as put by
Nicolini (2013: 179). For him (2013: 179), Schatzki’s sophisticated theo-
retical outline, which considers all the permutations of practice (the four
basic mechanisms) is problematic, because “exploring how practices are
linked together is an empirical, not a theoretical, question”.
Schatzki’s attempt to develop a complete architecture of conceptualis-
ing practice stands in opposition to less prescriptive approaches such as
actor-network theory. A more general problem of practice approaches,
which are primarily based on philosophical traditions, is that they do not
translate easily into empirical research agendas, and how they can inform
the study of international practices therefore remains questionable. This
might be why practice turn scholars in IR have principally been
interested in sociology, social theory, and to a lesser extent philosophy.
68 C. BUEGER AND F.
GADINGER

NOTEs
1. This, obviously implies that we pay less attention to other Foucauldian dis-
cussions, such as on the concept of biopower.
2. A task and focus that demonstrates resemblances between Foucault and
pragmatists such as Dewey (see Barnett 2015; Koopman 2013;
Vanderveen 2010 and Rabinow 2011).
3. For a discussion of these two diverging interpretations of governmentality,
see, among others, Walters (2012: 93–109) or Death (2013).
4. Other studies include Merlingen (2003) and Jaeger (2008, 2010).
5. See Fougner (2008), Porter (2012), Davis, Kingsbury and Engle Merry
(2012a), or the contributions in Broome and Quirk (2015).
6. See, for instance, Friedrichs and Kratochwil (2009) or Lebow (2007), who
use the term without pointing to its origins or further elaborating on it.
7. Besides the works discussed above, other articles using or referring to CPA
in contexts related to IR include Wilson (2006) on development policy,
Gilson (2009) on NGO networks, Lachmann (2011) on the Alliance of
Civilizations, O’Toole and Talbot (2010) on learning in the Australian
Army, and Roberts (2010) on Humanitarianism.
 CHAPTER 4

Approaches in International
Practice Theory II

This chapter continues our review of the main IPT approaches. We discuss
three of them; the focus on narratives, actor-network theory and prag-
matic sociology. In contrast to the approaches discussed so far, these are
examples of groups of authors who have developed a common
vocabulary, rather than being clearly focussed on the body of work of a
distinct theo- rist. Moreover, in IR discussions, narrative approaches and
actor-network theory have not always been included in the body of
practice theoretical thought, although, as we demonstrate, and as is
widely acknowledged in other disciplinary contexts, they are an essential
part of it. Pragmatic soci- ology is one of the younger approaches, having
only reached the IPT dis- cussion quite recently. As in the prior chapter, our
objective is not exegesis, but to provide a concise introduction to the
conceptual vocabulary and strategies for the study of practice outlined in
the approaches, and to explore their respective advantages and
disadvantages.

4.1 NaRRaTIVES aND STORYTELLING

The concept of narrative has experienced a renaissance across the social
sciences, and the practice theoretical discussion is no exception. Narratives
are conceptualised in a specific way; if in textualism it tends to become a
synonym for ‘discourse’, ‘collective myths’, or ‘ideology’, others relate it
to strategic action and conceive narratives in terms of frames, arguments
or scripts. The concept should be understood as an intermediary term,

© The Author(s) 2018 69

C. Bueger, F. Gadinger, International Practice
Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-
73350-0_4
70 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

which avoids substantialist notions, however. Practice theorists adopt a

processual understanding of narrative and emphasise that narratives or
‘stories’ function as the social bond, or ‘glue’ that gives practices stability
over time and space (cf. de Certeau 1984: 70; Rouse 1996: 27).
Narratives, in this sense, are a form of configuration device by which
actors make sense of the world and order it in a specific way. They order
a heterogeneous world into more-or-less coherent configurations. As
Jerome Bruner (1991: 4) remarked, “we organise our experiences and
our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative –
stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on”.
Narrative approaches therefore assume that “human beings are inher-
ently storytellers who have a natural capacity to recognise the coherence
and fidelity of stories they tell and experience” (Fisher 1987: 24). However,
storytelling is never an isolated action; stories are part of practices and
imply joint activities. Storytelling is a social practice used by people to
understand each other and build the social bonds of collective identity. For
Barbara Czarniawska (2004: 3) the “enacted narrative” is “the most basic
form of social life”. Her notion of the ‘enacted narrative’ points to the
performative dimension of narration: narratives are required to be acted
out and hence always relate to practical activities.
In practice research, narratives are a tool to analyse controversies as ‘bat-
tles’ between different narratives, which are employed by actors in their
deliberative practices to make sense of a problem (Fischer 2003). In
organ- isation studies, narratives are used to understand power struggles as
practices of successful or failed storytelling (Czarniawska 1997). Narrative is
constitu- tive of action in organisations insofar “that stories shape the
organisational landscape as individuals and organisations become actors
in their own sto- ries” (Fenton and Langley 2011: 1186). Narrative is,
therefore, a mode of knowing and enacting in the world that reminds us
that language is not a purely technical repertoire we use in communication
to make rational argu- ments. The splitting of the real from the fictional,
or the myth from the logos, is an understanding that holds sway in both
natural and social sci- ences. However, our everyday language makes it
obvious that the boundar- ies are blurred. It is not a coincidence that the
consideration of current political events (e.g. the Brexit vote, Donald
Trump’s electoral victory, Erdogan’s rise) is often interpreted through the
prism of novels (Shakespeare), television series (House of Cards), and films
(The Great Dictator).
In IR, the concept of narrative is principally related to practices of col-
lective storytelling describing the emergence of larger community building
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 71

and identity construction in the tradition of Imagined Communities

(Anderson 1991). Some examples include the process of European inte-
gration (Eder 2009), narratives of redemption in the Israeli Negev (Galai
2017), and historical foreign policy changes (Barnett 1999). Narrative
approaches move practice theory closer to the research agenda of cultural
and literature studies by reconsidering identity, legitimacy, and collective
sense-making. They are a way of giving meaning to practices, of
producing social bonds and identity through collective storytelling, and
of providing actors with a sense of direction to coordinate their
activities.
Three core ideas provide the foundations of narrative approaches:
nar- ration has to be understood as an interplay between storytelling
actors (homo narrans) and audiences; narratives entail power relations; and
nar- ratives organise the stream of polyphony (Gadinger et al. 2014a).
Firstly, narrative approaches conceptualise actors as “storytelling ani-
mals” (MacIntyre 1984: 216) or as homo narrans (Koschorke 2012). Such
a conceptualisation of actors is closely related to the model of homo ludens,
which projects actors as players (Huizinga 1949), and the understanding
of creative actors in pragmatism (Joas 1996; Boltanski 2011). Narration
requires agency in two ways: on the one hand, narrative involves human
beings as characters or actors in the unfolding of a plot, that is, actors
have a distinct role in a story (Polkinghorne 1988: 19–20). They can, for
instance, be the heroes in a story. On the other hand, narratives require
the voice of a narrator. This means that a narrative is never neutral, and
that narrative constructions of the world are attempts to make sense of
reality (Patterson and Monroe 1998: 316). Storytelling is subjective, and
linked to practical judgments of selective interpretation, personal experi-
ences, and sequencing of events (cf. Somers 1994: 616). Narratives are
therefore configurations and attempts at collective sense-making. We are
never the sole authors of our own narratives.
Storytelling is embedded in cultural practices of everyday life, and
involves an audience. As Czarniawska (2004: 5) argues, “in every conversa-
tion a positioning takes place which is accepted, rejected or improved upon
by the partners in the conversation”. In other words, when narrative is
the “main device for making sense of social action” (Czarniawska 2004:
11), it is also a political device that generates legitimacy and mutual
agreements. Narratives provide a glue for practices, but they are not static
and therefore change over time. Searching for a common understanding
through narra- tive is a fragile process of retelling stories; narratives
therefore need to be seen as conditional and joint achievements.
72 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Should they lose their credibility and thus their legitimising function,
narrators and their audiences adjust stories. Hendrik Wagenaar (2011:
212) describes this process as follows: “[t]he audience will judge the sto-
ry’s coherence, plausibility and acceptability. If it fails on any of these
counts, it will suggest adjustments or suggest a different story
altogether”. Storytelling therefore depends on the craft of producing a
narrative that is both aimed towards the future and resonates with a
wider audience.
To provide an example: the plausibility of U.S. presidential candidate
Donald J. Trump’s ability to ‘make America great again’ once in office
was never the point of the narrative, particularly because no coherent
defini- tion could ever capture what this ‘greatness’ actually was. Instead,
inciting collective emotion was the central goal of Trump’s campaigning
narrative, a ploy that successfully appealed to a significant electorate.
Thus, the power of storytelling follows criteria other than the logic of
a superior argument. Although Trump’s dubious moral convictions and
the explicit blurring of the line between fact and fiction may have
shocked many peo- ple, truth is not necessarily key to the power of
storytelling activities. Despite this makeshift construction and
temporality of narrative, all groups, communities, or collectives – be it
families, organisations, peoples, or nations – depend on collectively
shared stories as social bonds. A con- tinuous and active retelling of
stories is important for legitimacy and social order. Shared stories,
however, can unite and divide, especially in politics. Secondly,
storytelling is always about power. Narratives are organised in
particular configurations, or ‘plots’. These plots are rooted in a range of
practical choices of actors: strategic purposes, moral judgments,
aesthetic preferences, or claims of power and authority. This means there
is always a close connection between the moral meaning of a story and
its plot as well as its ending. Stories are seldom told just for fun; there is
an underlying
purpose to them (Wagenaar 2011: 214).
To argue that narratives are always part of power relations does not
imply that this refers to the material capacities of actors. Rather,
storytell- ing is embedded in cultural practices of communication and
related to distinct opportunities of articulation (Gadinger et al. 2014a:
10–12). Not everyone can tell stories at any time. The practice-theoretical
understand- ing of narration involves closely scrutinising the rhetorical
devices and nar- rative techniques used, such as negotiating, governing or
disputing. ‘Successful’ storytelling, which reaches wider audiences,
implies the dra- maturgical involvement of powerful metaphors, figures
of identification and, often, ‘tricks’. Maarten Hajer (2009: 40) argues that
the right mixture
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 73

between narrative, conflict, and drama determines whether policy facts

have news value and reach a wider audience: “[n]o representation without
dramatisation”.
Stories also function as “affective triggers insofar as emotions and
nar- rative are deeply intertwined” (Mayer 2014: 7). The dimension of
power is crucial when a narrative is configured and sequenced in a
beginning, a middle, and an end, also known as emplotment. It is
emplotment that “gives significance to independent instances, not their
chronological or categorical order” and “translates events into episodes”
(Somers 1994: 616). Once a plot has been established, the association of
events with actors is likely. These associations occur through narrative
configuration, where the cause becomes the initiator, the solution turns into
the redeemer and both invoke solidarity or even imitation in a different
manner. In pro- cesses of conflict resolution, nation-building, and the
memorisation of past experiences of violence, for instance, the question
of how narratives are configured and how knowledge is selectively
appropriated is primarily one of claims to power and authority.
Selecting the beginning of a story is already an intrinsically power-
imbued action, because it determines which information disappears and
which events are kept alive (Koschorke 2012: 62). In international poli-
tics, different types of stories are dominant. Stone (2002: 138–145)
argues that in policy issues, two types of stories are most relevant: the
story of decline, in several variations (e.g. change is only an illusion); and
the story of helplessness and control, in several variations (e.g. blame the
victim). In IR, Paul Sheeran (2007) similarly argues that international
politics can be understood through the mode of narrative by referring to
key works in world literature that provide typical stories: the romances
of heroes and villains, the romantic struggles for a utopian society, and
the tragedies of power politics.
Thirdly, storytelling is relational, and narratives tend to overlap. A
nar- rated world is a non-linear stream of multiple narratives, most
suitably described as ‘polyphony’. Narration is a collaborative and
unpredictable practice in which narrators and audiences come to a shared
understanding. There is more than one narrative told at any single point in
time. Narratives are always both telling/presentation and told/presented;
that is, they involve time and sequence.
Narration can be understood as a dialogical communicative process
involving the dynamic interaction of two temporal strands, the present
and the past (Kreiswirth 2000: 303). Such a bivalent understanding of
74 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

narrative as a contingent stream of reception and transmission points to

a “powerful third entity” between narrator and audience that are
organised in distinct practices of communication (Koschorke 2012: 87).
The UK riots in 2011, for example, provide an apt case illustrating what
polyphony means in political discourse. To make sense of this puzzling
event and its violence, both the British government and protesters used
the powerful metaphor of a ‘broken society’, albeit in completely
different ways. Whereas the government used it to legitimise a law and
order narrative by claiming that criminal youth had broken a societal
contract, the protestors (unsuccessfully) mobilised a narrative of moral
blame for the Conservative- led government, which had, according to
them, reinforced inequalities and structural racism in society (Gadinger
et al. 2014b).
The fluid re-arrangement of connected parts and elements in narrative
configuration brings the concept close to the notion of ‘translation’, as
developed in actor-network theory (ANT), or by Luc Boltanski, discussed
below. Similar to ANT, narrative approaches put emphasis on polyphony
and the capacity of narratives to translate heterogeneous elements into sin-
gle, uniform collectives with joint objectives. Narration can also fail, how-
ever. Inconsistent or unmanageable translation may hinder the coordination
of multiple voices from becoming a collective sense-making narrative.
In IPT, the concept of narrative is closely related to the work of Iver
Neumann (2002, 2005, 2007, 2012). His approach has been notably
developed by using diplomacy as the core empirical case. Neumann
attempts to re-combine the study of meaning in discourse analysis with the
study of practice to gain a better understanding of ‘culture’. However,
here the term ‘culture’ is understood not as a fixed entity or as causal
vari- able, but as a circuit of practice, discourse, and stories (Neumann
2002: 637). For Neumann, stories or narratives are of key importance
due to their intermediary function in this cultural circuit, and the power
relations they establish. As he argues in referring to narrative sociologist
Margaret Somers, people are guided to act in certain ways on the basis of
“the pro- jections, expectations, and memories derived from a multiple
but ulti- mately limited repertoire of available social, public, and cultural
narratives” (2002: 637). For him, “the social fact that actions are ordered
in a particu- lar way and not another may be conceptualised as a story
that instructs specific people in specific contexts” (Neumann 2002: 637).
In this ‘instruction’, however, lies the duality of narratives: stories can
reproduce practices, constrain them and block forces of renewal, or they
may produce new practices, “open a field for them”, and thereby can lead
to social change (Neumann 2002: 635, 637).
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 75

Equipped with this conceptualisation of ‘narration in practice’,

Neumann illustrates how diplomacy works in the field, and that “to be a
diplomat” (Neumann 2005) involves juggling different and often
contradicting scripts rooted in deeper cultural narratives of Western
diplomacy. The bureaucratic script, for instance, guides diplomatic work in
established rou- tines such as text-producing practices; yet the heroic
story that Neumann calls the “script of the deed” (Neumann 2005: 73),
requires the diplomat to rove around the world as a trouble-shooter and
to gather new intelli- gence information. Finally, the self-effacing role as
mediator completes diplomats’ difficult task of balancing the tensions in
the Western narration of diplomacy and the performing of practices ‘at
home’ and ‘abroad’. Diplomats cannot reconcile the polyphony of
different scripts; they can only learn to juggle them in practice.
In a detailed analysis of speechwriting as a diplomatic practice that
draws on the case of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Neumann (2007) shows another aspect of narration: the coordination of
different voices to preserve the legitimacy of a collective. Neumann
recognises that speeches are attempts of the ministry to speak with one
voice. Speeches, then, are less the result of a sort of tug of war; rather
they emerge in a process “in which different points of view and
emphases are patched together in a manner that everyone can live with”
(Neumann 2007: 192). The practice of speechwriting therefore hinders
innovative moves by repeating existing practices and ideas. In other
words, the “focus of diplo- macy is maintenance, not change” (Neumann
2012: 16). Neumann (2012: 171) concludes that diplomats are moulded
to serve the needs of power; however, most of the time they are
influenced indirectly by dis- course and not by direct orders from
superiors. Diplomats are caught in reproductive stories; they “monitor
and govern their own practices by drawing on the stories that discourse
holds out” (Neumann 2012: 171). Neumann clearly underlines how a
focus on narratives and stories can provide promising avenues for the
study of international practices.
There is a large body of other studies in IPT that translate the
narrative dimension of practices into conceptual and empirical work.
Bueger (2013a) draws on the concept of narrative to investigate the
justification and persis- tency of Somali piracy. Linking the concept of
narrative to the community of practice approach, he argues that Somali
pirates are organised by a ‘grand narrative’ that projects piracy as a quasi-
state practice of the protec- tion of sovereignty against foreign intruders.
As Bueger (2013a: 1812) argues, the pirate’s “coastguard narrative” has
two core functions: firstly, it
76 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

provides coherence to the Somali piracy practice across time and space and
stabilises the identity of the community as coastguards. Secondly, the
nar- rative has strategic value, rendering piracy more effective and
attempting to produce legitimacy and recognition for piracy as a practice
that has socio-political objectives. Such a perspective on piracy as a
narrative-driven practice provides a major alternative to theories that
conceptualise pirates as economic, rationally calculating individuals, as
well as to studies that focus primarily on the root causes of the
phenomenon. Paying attention to narrative here reveals how actors
justify and organise their practices by positioning themselves.
In the case of US foreign policy, Richard Devetak (2009) provides a
different version of the narrative approach and shows how the construc-
tion of events in global politics, such as September 11, is intrinsically tied
to narratives. In the absence of storytelling, there would be no
meaningful event. September 11 did not speak for itself, and is
interpreted in many different ways. Devetak (2009: 804–808) identifies
five narratives that emerged after the event. These respectively describe
September 11 as a trauma, as a world-changing event, as an act of
terrorism, as an act of war, or as an act of evil. Each of these
interpretations creates different worlds through collective storytelling.
Indeed, as Devetak (2009: 803) argues, events do not exist indepen-
dently or outside of narratives. This means that events do not precede
narrative, but instead are articulated and moulded through them. In this
process of enactment, narratives draw on prior moral and political scripts,
and predispose policy responses and practices. As a result, the dominant
narration of September 11 as an act of (or a new kind of) war provides
different strategic choices and legitimises new rules and practices, such as
targeting states for harbouring terrorists or doubting the relevance of
the Geneva conventions (Devetak 2009: 809). This approach links
directly to literature studies. By using Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, in
which an ‘airborne toxic event’ is told collectively, he is able to
successfully show how similar patterns of narrative practices produce
the fictional and real,
i.e. the literary and political world.
Studying the war on terror, Lee Jarvis and Jack Holland (2014) use the
concept of narrative to explain the political conditions around the death
of Osama bin Laden. They argue that the narration of these events was
char- acterised, firstly, by considerable discursive continuity with the
war on terrorism discourse of George W. Bush, and, secondly, by a
gradual removal or ‘forgetting’ of bin Laden and the circumstances of his
death. The latter construction of forgetting is particularly interesting in
terms of
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 77

narrative. This took place via a “stylistic shift towards ‘cleaner’ language
and metaphorical description”, and “through an increasing focus on the
consequences – rather than fact and details – of his death for the US and
its constituent publics” (Jarvis and Holland 2014: 2). Each of these narra-
tive dynamics contributed to the legitimisation of his killing.
Furthermore, the case shows the importance of narrative remembrance
and forgetting alike for the conduct and justification of liberal violence.
Ronald Krebs (2015a, b) introduced the concept of narrative in for-
eign policy analysis and security studies by writing a new description of
US foreign policy during the Cold War. For him (2015a: 810), expla-
nations of US policy are narrowly focused on the dominant, but rather
static narrative of national security in terms of a Cold War consensus.
That is, changes in foreign policy are determined by military defeats
(Vietnam trauma) while the stabilisation of a dominant narrative follows
military triumph (Cuban Missile Crisis). In a detailed narrative
reconstruction, Krebs (2015a: 811) submits the opposite, contending
that “the disheart- ening Korean War facilitated the Cold War narrative’s
rise to dominance, whereas the triumph of the Cuban Missile Crisis made
possible that narra- tive’s breakdown before the upheaval of Vietnam”.
Krebs’s broader analy- sis (2015b) can be understood as a suggestion to
overcome the narrow focus on either strategic actors in foreign policy or on
structuralist explana- tions of systemic constraints.
This implies reconsidering much of the received wisdom in interna-
tional politics, and taking a closer look at narrative changes in foreign
policy by considering the narrating skills of political figures such as John
F. Kennedy. The role of myths in international politics is therefore closely
related to narrative studies, and remains a rather unexplored issue in IR.
A recent edited volume (Bliesemann de Guevara 2016) rebuts the com-
mon notion of myths as fictions and shows the ideological, naturalising,
and depoliticising effects of myths as well as their constitutive, enabling,
and legitimatising functions in international politics. Prime examples are
the ‘graveyard of empire’ in Afghanistan, which guides Western thinking
in intervention issues (Kü hn 2016), and the myth of civil society
participa- tion as a legitimising tool in global governance (Dany and
Freistein 2016). Research on transitional justice is another field in which
narrative approaches have been developed. Susanne Buckley-Zistel
(2014: 144), for instance, notes that the past can never be (re)visited,
but only grasped from the purview of today. It is therefore important
to look at the con- struction of knowledge about this past. She argues
that people use narra- tives as a strategy to endow events and
experiences in their lives with
78 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

meaning in order to come to terms with them. Studying the case of truth
commissions in South Africa, Buckley-Zistel (2014: 149–154) illustrates
how the stories of victims or witnesses of past crimes are embedded into an
institutional framework. This framework defines the causal emplotment,
selective appropriation, and sequencing of the story, and therefore deter-
mines the structure that forms thinking and enunciation. Consequently,
she argues, “reconciliation became the term that endowed narratives
with meaning in order to foster nation-building in the deeply divided
society” (Buckley-Zistel 2014: 155).
Other studies around issues of transitional justice explain processes of
conflict transformation and memory politics through concepts of narrative
and practice. Mneesha Gellman (2017) demonstrates how ethnic
minority groups use strategic narratives in countries including Turkey
and Mexico to mobilise memories of violence in order to shame states into
cooperating with claims for cultural rights protections.
In the case of Israel and debates about ‘New History’, Lisa Strö mbom
(2012) shows that narratives of war can be reversed through the introduc-
tion of narratives of thick recognition, which generally play a major role
in processes of conflict resolution. Accordingly, Joelle Cruz (2014)
explains, with a stronger emphasis on practices, how traumatic
memories recon- struct present-day organising practices using a case
study of a group of market women (called susu) who guarantee food
security in the post- conflict context of Liberia. By using an ethnographic
approach, Cruz (2014: 453–458) effectively demonstrates how traumatic
memories engender and sustain the three organising practices of
idealisation, ampli- fication, and contraction.
These studies show how narratives make past experiences understand-
able and create conditions for future action and organising practices.
Narrative approaches here show how various forms of action in which
the past and the present are linked are socially negotiated through
narrative practices. More generally, the concept of narrative provides a
promising methodological entry-point to analyse the negotiation of
identity by con- sidering different plots, which are commonly used to
make sense in post- conflict scenarios (Khoury 2017).
Narrative approaches foreground the importance of meaning-making
and symbolic representation for the study of practices. Narratives not
only provide stability for practices, but are also powerful devices for
making sense, for justifying political actions, and providing instruction in
concrete situations. Storytelling has an ordering effect on practices in
everyday life;
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 79

a plausible story creates order in a shifting, unpredictable and incoherent

environment (Wagenaar 2011: 216). The growing relevance of narrative
analysis in practice research is “rooted in its ability to serve as a tool for
describing events and developments without presuming to voice a
histori- cal truth” (Shenhav 2006: 246). During situations of crisis (e.g.
the global financial crisis, the EU migration crisis, and urban protests) a
change of practice occurs in conjunction with a reconfiguration of
dominating narra- tives. Narrative approaches also build bridges to other
cultural approaches, notably discourse analysis.
The incorporation of practice theory into narrative analysis and vice
versa builds a bridge between the practice turn and the linguistic turn in
constructivist thinking (Faizullaev and Cornut 2017). The analysis of
rhe- torical devices and narrative practices, including the use of
metaphors, forces of imagination and other rhetorical tricks (e.g. Hü lsse
2006; Marks 2011; Oppermann and Spencer 2016) become more
relevant than in other IPT approaches. This also includes visual
narratives such as films, documentaries, photos, and images as carriers
of meaning in political sto- rytelling (e.g. Gadinger et al. 2016).
Critics have raised doubts as to whether narrative approaches are
con- sistent with the family of practice theories (Frost and Lechner
2016b: 300). This broadening can also be criticised for its focus on
discourse and structure, in particular when narrative is conceptualised in
terms of meta- structures such as collective myths or grand narratives. A
new dualism of narrative and practice can arise, thereby contradicting
the core ideas of practice theory. Narrative approaches, moreover,
foreground the linguistic dimension of practice. They focus on sayings
rather than doings, and hence tend to downplay the material dimensions
of practices, including the importance of bodies and objects.
Furthermore, a focus on the fluid process of narration carries the risk of
blurring narrative and practice into one fuzzy concept. The narrative
approach, however, adds an important dimension to the study of
practice, and more directly than others, links the study of practice to
recent work in cultural studies.

4.2 aCTOR-NETWORK THEORY

What has become known as actor-network theory, or ANT for short, is an
approach to the study of practice developed primarily in science and
tech- nology studies. Its best-known protagonists are sociologists of
science and technology such as Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Karin Knorr
Cetina,
80 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Annemarie Mol or John Law. ANT has not necessarily been received as a
practice theoretical approach in IR. 1 This might be related to the lack of
formal declarations of intent to focus on practice theory by ANT protago-
nists, in the relative hesitation of ANT to give the term ‘practice’ equal
prominence as other practice theorists do, or in the often strange and exotic
vocabulary of ANT, which tends to cloud the obvious linkages to other
practice approaches and its membership in the practice theory family.
Indeed, in many ways ANT is the black sheep of this family. ANT
pushes some of the ideas of practice theory the furthest: it focusses on
the study of associations and relations by which the world is assembled
and becomes ordered, it stresses contingency and fluidity, invents new
terms and concepts, and aims at a thoroughly symmetrical position
between the social and the material. However, as commentators in IR
and elsewhere have argued, it appears strange not to think about ANT as
a theory of practice. Social theorists, therefore, usually include ANT in
their discus- sions of practice theory; this move is also significant for
IPT.
Like other perspectives, ANT was invented in different places at the
same time. For John Law (2009: 142–146) ANT formed at the intersec-
tion of studies of technology, field work in laboratories and theoretical
discussions in French sociology on Michel Serres’ semiotics, Gilles
Deleuze’s relationalism, and the work of Foucault. The first generation of
ANT consisted of studies of scientific laboratories or of technological
inventions, as the interest of scholars in what scientists actually do when
they go about their work led to ethnomethodological studies of academic
practices in laboratories. Latour and Woolgar’s (1979) Laboratory Life,
which reported on the work in the Californian Salk laboratory, and
Latour’s (1987) Science in Action were the most influential.
These studies presented thick descriptions of the kind of activities
that scientists perform in laboratories, how they speak and act and
thereby cre- ate objects, fabricate facts and establish certainty for their
knowledge. They showed what kind of social and material infrastructure is
required to stabi- lise facts and other entities, and how it becomes
possible for them to travel beyond the laboratory. Latour describes these
early studies as attempts to visit the “construction sites” (Latour 2005:
88) in which innovation, new knowledge and new entities were
manufactured. As he outlines, through ANT “we went backstage; we
learned about the skills of practitioners; we saw innovations come into
being; we felt how risky it was; and we wit- nessed the puzzling merger
of human activities and non-human activities” (Latour 2005: 90).
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 81

Studies on technological interventions, by contrast, were interested in

when and how the invention of new technologies succeeds or fails. These
studies demonstrated the complex web of material and social relations that
make technological inventions. Classical studies include Michel Callon’s
(1986b) study of the failure to establish the electric vehicle as a main trans-
port device in France, as well as his investigation of the cultivation of
scal- lops at St. Brieu Bay (Callon 1986a), Law’s (1987) study of the
Portuguese maritime empire, Law and Callon’s (1992) publication on
airplane tech- nology, Latour’s (1988) work on the success of Louis
Pasteur in eliminat- ing anthrax, or his study of a transportation
technology in Aramis, or the Love of Technology (Latour 1996).
Part of ANT’s expansion since the 1990s consisted of considerably
broadening the empirical focus. Studies went ‘beyond science’ and
started to address various subject matters, including different kinds of
organisa- tions and technologies (Law 1994; Czarniawska 2008), health
practices (Mol 2002), financial markets (Callon 1998; MacKenzie et al.
2007), or law-making (Latour 2010). Political entities such as ‘the state’ also
became objects of ANT focus (Passoth and Rowland 2010).
Venturing into such domains also brought ANT much closer to IR
concerns. Throughout the 2010s ANT has gained considerable trac-
tion in IR, with studies addressing different phenomena, ranging from
international organisations, to airports, failed states, or climate change.
Although the actor-network theory label suggests otherwise, ANT – simi-
lar to practice theory in general, as explored in Chap. 6 – should not be
understood as a ‘theory’ in the conventional sense. In Law’s (2009: 147)
understanding, ANT is primarily “a toolkit for telling interesting stories”
about relationality and how one can interfere in these relations. For Mol
(2010b: 281) ANT “is a loose assemblage of related, shifting, sometimes
clashing, notions, sensitivities and concerns”. As these descriptions high-
light, ANT is a relatively broad conglomerate of empirical studies. The
easiest way of grasping what ANT involves is to investigate a number of
core ideas and concepts.
At the heart of ANT is a strong version of relationalism. ANT studies
how different ‘actants’ – that is, anything that acts or has the capacity to
do so – are related to each other, the practical work that is required to
make and maintain these relations, how actants become powerful by
hold- ing multiple relations together, and how these relations are challenged
and changed over time. Phenomena such as agency, objects, knowledge,
power, or concepts are hence understood as effects of relations.
82 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

The concept of actant is crucial here. Rather than postulating that only
humans can create and maintain relations, ANT also ascribes such
capaci- ties to non-humans, that is, objects, machines, or animals. The
intention is to treat humans and non-humans, as well as the respective
domains of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, in the same manner, without having
a separate vocabulary for each of them. If other practice approaches
argue that non- humans, or ‘the material’, play a key role in practices, in
ANT this idea is pushed further, and the material and the social are
treated on equal terms. Due to its emphasis on relations and the
practical work that goes into making and maintaining them, ANT has also
been described as an extended version of semiotics, as “material
semiotics” (Law 2009). In semiotic thinking, words acquire their
meaning relationally, through their similari- ties and differences to other
words. Words form part of a network of words. ANT extends such an
understanding from language to the rest of the world. Mol (2010a:
247) gives the telling example of ‘fish’: “the word ‘fish’ is not a label
that points with an arrow to the swimming creature itself. Instead, it
achieves sense through its contrast with ‘meat’, its associa- tion with ‘gills’
or ‘scales’ and its evocation of ‘water’ ” (Mol 2010a: 257). In ANT, this
understanding is generalised. “It is not simply the term, but the very
phenomenon of ‘fish’ that is taken to exist thanks to its rela- tions. A fish
depends on, is constituted by, the water it swims in, the plank- ton or
little fish that it eats, the right temperature and pH, and so on” (Mol
2010a: 257). ANT, then, involves studying the makeup of relational
networks in which phenomena such as fish, technologies or concepts are
given content and form through relations.
The core intent of ANT is consequently to describe and understand
the formation of such networks and the practical work required to make
them durable and stable. Most studies provide thick narratives of how
relations are woven and maintained, and how different actants become
associated with each other. Many of the concepts that ANT uses are from
everyday language or taken from the empirical situations in which they
have been found. Over the course of these empirical studies, however, a
range of distinct concepts has also been developed. It is useful to know
them; although ANT implies keeping conceptual vocabulary parsimoni-
ous due to the priority given to the empirical, these concepts provide
use- ful conceptual starting points for writing an ANT analysis. The
concepts of ‘translation’, ‘blackbox’, ‘obligatory passage point’, and
‘laboratory’ are especially useful for the concerns of IPT.
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 83

The concept of translation is perhaps the most generic concept devel-

oped in ANT studies. Introduced by Callon (1986a, b), it addresses the
way in which actants become related. Initially, it refers to nothing more
than the relation between two or more actants. For Callon (1986a: 197),
“to translate is to create convergences and homologies out of particulari-
ties.” Through translation, actants become interested in working
together and develop shared objectives. In this process, the identity of
the actants changes as they take on new roles. This notion of changing
identities through translation foregrounds a major difference between
ANT and conventional network theory, which assumes that actors have a
stable identity before they enter the network and that these remain
constant. For ANT, actors are not quite the same from situation to
situation, as they transform in the process of translation (Gad and Bruun
Jensen 2009). They are transformed in their movement between
practices; actants are found in different yet related versions, and
networks develop through actors’ transformational interactions (Gad
and Bruun Jensen 2009).
The concept of a blackbox, coined by Latour in his Science in Action
(1987), describes a situation in which a new entity emerges and the rela-
tions and controversies that were required to bring it about have been
forgotten or are hidden. What was required for the entity to be built, all
the hard work and the conflicts that had to be won, are no longer visible.
Think about any machine we use in our everyday life. One hardly ques-
tions how these work, or why they work the way they do. We use a smart
phone, a car or computer, but if we don’t pursue a career as an engineer,
we have very little knowledge about why they function as they do.
Latour discusses the example of an overhead projector. Usually, the
pro- jector is a “point in a sequence of actions” (Latour 1994: 36), for
instance, a lecture. In such situations, the technology mediates. The
overhead pro- jector processes an input – a small slide – into an output – a
large projection on the wall. It is “a silent and mute intermediary, taken
for granted, com- pletely determined by its function” (Latour 1994: 36).
But what happens if the projector breaks down? We become aware of its
existence. In the event of such a crisis, “the repairmen swarm around,
adjusting this lens, tightening that bulb, we remember that the projector
is made of several parts, each with its role and function” (Latour 1994:
36). Watching the repairmen at work makes us aware not only of the
parts that make the pro- jector function, but also the sequence of human
actions required to allow it to do so. Latour’s story of the failing
overhead projector is a classic case of a blackbox and how it is made
visible. In ANT’s generalised symmetry,
84 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

processes of blackboxing and unboxing do not only refer to technologies,

but to any phenomenon or entity. A scientific fact can be understood as a
black box, as can a concept, a routine, or an institution.
The equally influential concepts of obligatory passage points and
spokespersonship were coined by Callon (1986a) in his seminal study of
the fishermen of St. Brieu. Both are concepts of power, and grasp the
con- centration of relations and the emergence of nodal points in webs of
asso- ciations. The terms refer to a situation in which an actant has
achieved a central position and can exert control over the network. The
concept of ‘obligatory passage points’ points to a network in which one
actant has become influential to the degree that the network cannot be
enacted or transformed in a meaningful way without taking that entity
into consider- ation. Relations have to pass through the element both to
enact the net- work, as well as to transform it.
Obligatory passage points therefore mediate the relations in an actor-
network and often define roles or scripts of action for others associated
in it. If networks become stabilised and well ordered, this often leads not
only to one actant exerting internal control, but also representing the
whole of the network towards others. In this scenario, one actant
becomes the ‘spokesperson’ for the network. In ANT logic, such a
spokesperson could be, for instance, a non-human entity to which the
whole of the net- work has been delegated. While non-human
spokespersonship tends to provide more durable networks (Law 2009:
148), a spokesperson in principle may also be a human, as is the case in
Latour’s (1988) story of Pasteur speaking in the name of anthrax.
The results of early ethnomethodological work on scientific laborato-
ries led ANT researchers (Rouse 1987, Latour 1987) to generalise
‘labora- tory’ as a concept that stands for a site in which many relations
are made and hold together. In this sense, the concept refers to a distinct
locale in which different actants work together to process inputs into
outputs. For Rouse (1987), a laboratory could be seen as a general model
of power. In them, “systems of objects are constructed under known
circumstances and isolated from other influences so that they can be
manipulated and kept track of” (Rouse 1987: 101).
Latour (1987) coined the notion of ‘centres of calculation’ to speak
about laboratories. For him, such centres were sites “where information
is being created, collected, assembled, transcribed, transported to, simplified
and juxtaposed in a single location, where everything that is relevant can
be seen” (Law 2003: 8). In such centres, traces can be explored which
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 85

stand, in a single place, for a whole set of events and processes

distributed through time and space. These become a centre as the result
of an asym- metrical configuration of a structure and the flows that move
along it. The efforts of all elements become directed by, and indeed
belong to the cen- tre, “which comes to stand for and articulate them
all” (Law 2003: 8). The translation of the concept of laboratory in such
generic models of powerful locales spurred some criticism. For instance,
Guggenheim (2012) criticises the proliferating use of the term, warns
about conceptual overstretch, and suggests that the concept should be
restricted to actual science laboratories. In response to such criticism,
Latour (2005) pro- posed the notion of oligopticon to refer to sites that
have extraordinary capacities to create and maintain relations. He points
to bureaucratic units or military command and control centres as
instances that perform such functions. Indeed, state capitals or
international organisations can also be interpreted as such.
With these concepts, ANT studies have developed a rich vocabulary.
The concepts display a degree of ‘emptiness’, however. While they imply
a certain ontological stance, they require empirical research to bring
them to life, and can hardly be said to constitute a theory independent
from empirical material.
In IR, William Walters (2002) was perhaps the first to draw attention
to the ANT perspective. Arguing that we should pay more attention to
the material of politics, he drew on Latourian insights to show how a
bureaucratic form is a vital actant in European integration. Since then,
ANT studies have gained significant traction, on one side as a
consequence of the interest in IR for practices and the material, but also
because many ANT scholars have increasingly branched out beyond the
narrow focus on science and technology and started to study
international phenomena.
Lidskog and Sundqvist (2002) were among the first to demonstrate
the analytical power of ANT in the analysis of global governance, and in
par- ticular providing a new conceptualisation of the link between
science and politics. Studying the Convention on Long-Range
Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP), they illustrate how one of the
most effective global environmental regimes during the Cold War was
jointly co-produced by scientists and politicians. Lidskog and Sundqvist
argue, in a nutshell, that environmental science provided a neutral
ground for political cooperation between Cold War adversaries. As they
put it, the “politicians’ search for neutral – politically uncontroversial –
issues to cooperate on was an impor- tant explanatory factor with regard to
the scientific character of the regime”
86 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

(Lidskog and Sundqvist 2002: 89). Scientific knowledge has continued to

shape the evolution of the LRTAP regime in the following years. Drawing
on ANT, Lidskog and Sundqvist describe in particular how, in the 1990s,
scientists became crucial in translating the interests of states into the
expanding LRTAP regime, enabling them to cooperate in a far reaching
agreement to cut emissions.
In Bueger and Gadinger (2007), we argued in favour of understanding
the discipline of international relations as a web of relations and associa-
tions, which makes it the task of a sociology of IR to disentangle these
relations. Bueger and Villumsen (2007) used ANT concepts to
understand how the ‘fact’ of the democratic peace was manufactured
and translated into foreign policy doctrine. Maximilian Mayer (2012)
developed ANT concepts to show that the securitisation of climate
change relies on differ- ent material artefacts, while Peer Schouten
(2014: 23) drew on the case of Amsterdam airport to show how
security actants “perform security by enrolling, assembling and
translating heterogeneous elements into stable assemblages that can be
presented as definitive security solutions or threats”. In an attempt to show
the relevance of numerical indices, current peer review practices and
their effects, Tony Porter (2012) linked ANT to international political
economy. For Porter, humans and objects, in his case indices, form
transnational networks that can considerably alter the conduct of states.
Criticising the lack of attention to the agency of objects in IR, he reveals,
for instance, how World Bank indicators have blackbox- ing effects.
Porter’s strategy follows classic ANT studies in that he starts by outlining
core concepts of ANT and then proceeds in essentially providing
a thick empirical narrative of the formation of transnational networks.
Bueger and Bethke (2014) give us an example of how ANT can be
employed to study the career of a concept. Investigating how different
actors become associated by the concept of failed states, they show how
different actants struggle to establish spokespersonship and obligatory
passage points, though none of them fully succeeds. In consequence, the
notion of failed states has not become fully blackboxed. While the
concept successfully relates security and development actors to each other,
the net- work remains heterogeneous, with no single actor controlling it.
These examples forcefully document that the applications of ANT’s
vocabulary in IR are manifold. In contrast to other IPT approaches, ANT
foregrounds attention to detail, and often produces microscopic types of
analysis. It is especially useful if one is interested in emerging phenomenon,
and wants to put more emphasis on the role of the material in shaping the
international.
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 87

ANT has not been without criticism, however. In the first instance, this
concerns ANT studies’ style of analysis – they are often obsessed with
inventing new terms. As a result, the language employed can be opaque
and lead to rather quirky concepts and terms. The open-ended character
and multi-vocality of the narratives developed and the experimentation
with different literary styles tends to simultaneously fascinate and alienate
many readers. Indeed, at times, it makes ANT studies very difficult to
access. The second core critique is levelled at the generalised symmetry
of ANT and its attempt to treat humans and non-humans in the same
terms. This is not solely an ontological problem, and raises questions of
whether non-humans can have intentionality (Schatzki 2002). The anti-
humanist stance also leads to ethical problematiques, for instance whether it
is appro- priate to treat humans like objects; whether in a world of
actants anyone can still be held accountable for their actions. Finally, the
degree of con- tingency of the world that ANT studies assume also
questions the status of historical processes and development at a larger
scale. The fluid, relational worlds that ANT describes and its micro-
orientation appears to leave little room for history and social stability
over time (Nexon and Pouliot 2013). Consequently, larger forces of
power and global inequalities, such as class or gender, are hardly
conceptualised, or even mentioned in ANT (Winner 1993; Hornborg
2013).

4.3 PRaGMaTIC SOCIOLOGY aND THE WORK

OF LUC BOLTaNSKI

The pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski is a slightly less-established

approach in IPT. This is somewhat surprising, given the popularity of
Bourdieu’s praxeology and the fact that Boltanski presents one of the
most prolific critiques of it. Boltanski is one of the main protagonists of a
broader counter-movement to the dominance of Bourdieu in French
soci- ology. This movement, sometimes referred to as a ‘pragmatic turn’,
also includes other sociologists such as Laurent Thévenot, È ve Chiapello,
Michel de Certeau, and Bruno Latour. Although many of these scholars
do not formally claim to be practice theorists, they are effectively doing
practice theory.
Boltanski’s main focus lies in overcoming dualisms such as the
individ- ual and society or agency and structure. He draws inspiration
from American pragmatism by focusing on action, situations and ‘critical
capac- ities’ and rejects methodological individualism. In contrast to
rationalist
88 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

actor-models, he understands ‘action’ in its broadest sense; it takes place

within a multiplicity of orders, in a combination of common worlds, and
in hybrid relations between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans
(Dodier 1993). To describe this world, Boltanski develops a vocabulary
of conventions, coordination, capacities and practices of justification and
cri- tique as the main driving forces of social life. He also speaks about
transla- tions, relations or associations akin to the ANT vocabulary.
Boltanski is, therefore, less interested in the reproduction and stability of
practices than the Bourdieusian tradition. Instead, he is fascinated by the
fragility, uncer- tainty and disorder of the social, and how actors are
nevertheless able to coordinate their lives. This is characterised by a stream
of ‘critical moments’ and ‘tests’ they experience in everyday life shared
with others in human coexistence.
The objective of Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology is not to improve
Bourdieu’s social theory, although he frequently criticises it and accuses
the notions of habitus and field of implying structural determinism
(Boltanski 2011: 18–22). His main contribution to the practice turn lies,
rather, in the innovative combination of ethnomethodology in the tradi-
tion of Harold Garfinkel and pragmatist action theory as laid out, in par-
ticular, by John Dewey. In contrast to wider debates on social theory
(Bénatouïl 1999; Blokker 2011), IR has yet to recognise recent
pragmatist theorising as part of practice theory (Kratochwil 2011: 38).
Pragmatists in IR (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009; Hellmann 2009;
Schmidt 2014) have emphasised the potential of pragmatist thought
to develop new research methodologies. However, IR is preoccupied
with classical prag- matism, that is, the work of Dewey, James, Mead, and
Peirce. In conse- quence, pragmatism is mainly understood as a
philosophical programme, rather than a sociological or empirical one.
Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology has the potential for IR scholars to
translate pragmatism into an empirical approach to studying practices.
This interest in contested normative orders and the moral judgments of
actors in the interpretation of situations builds a bridge to norm-
oriented theorising in IR, such as Wiener’s theory of norm contestation
(Wiener 2008). Relying on the notion of ‘controversies’, Boltanski
demonstrates how pragmatism’s micro-analytical interests in actions,
contingency and creativity can be combined with a macro-structural
consideration of nor- mative orders and moral principles – termed as
‘orders of worth’ or regimes of justification (Boltanski and Thévenot
2006). From such a perspective, in practices micro-(situations) and macro-
perspectives (orders of worth) play together when actors attempt to cope
with conflicts in everyday life.
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 89

In order to understand Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology, it is easiest to

reflect on some of its core methodological premises, which allow us to
navigate through Boltanski’s heterogeneous, multi-world approach and
manifold concepts.
Firstly, pragmatic sociology stays true to the ethnomethodological dic-
tum of ‘following the actors’ (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 11–12;
Latour 2005: 23–25). This implies rejecting a division between ‘ordinary
actors’ and ‘professional analysts’, or, at least, attempting to minimise
the distance between objective and participant observation. For
pragmatic sociologists, “social practices cannot be understood from an
objective standpoint alone, because they are internally related to the
interpretations and self-images of their participants that can only be
grasped if one takes their perspective as fundamental” (Celikates 2006:
21).
According to Boltanski, the imperative to ‘follow the actors’, some-
times misunderstood as simple participant observation, firstly means that
actors, thanks to their critical capacities and reflective competences, pos-
sess relevant knowledge about the world; therefore an adequate theory
of practice can only be developed in a joint enterprise that integrates
their interpretations of the world as the main elements in theoretical
construc- tion. He therefore rejects the privileged position of social
scientists as objective analysts in a static, predictable world, and seeks to
inspire the analyst to phenomenologically “return to things themselves”
(Boltanski 2011: 24). While this symmetrical position has been criticised
by some IR scholars (e.g. Sending 2015) working in the tradition of
Bourdieu and Foucault by claiming a loss of scientific autonomy, for
Boltanski the oppo- site is true. He sees it as a way to renew the
possibility of a critical sociol- ogy by “focusing on the critical capacities of
ordinary actors and by taking as the subject of empirical research those
situations, abounding in ordi- nary life, in which actors put into play
these capacities, especially in the course of disputes” (Boltanski 2013:
44). Boltanski is aware that such a symmetrical position cannot take the
totality of these effects of actors’ actions into account. Nevertheless, the
focus on analysing situations as the “social world in the process of being
made” provides a framework that makes action “itself visible” (Boltanski
2011: 44).
Secondly, pragmatic sociology aims to foreground the importance of
actions. Boltanski (2011: 60) understands practice as a “certain register
of action”. Practices form in a continuous stream of acts and have
“neither a definite beginning nor a definite end” (Franke and Weber
2012: 675). To conceive of practice as made up of sequences of acts
means understanding situations as open spaces between routines that
perform established practices
90 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

and crises that create new practices (Franke and Weber 2012: 675–677).
Agency is, therefore, considered in a more substantial manner, and in
pragmatic sociology, actors are “active, not passive” and “frankly critical”
(Boltanski 2011: 26). Following this reinterpretation of the concept of
action as creative and critical also leads to refraining from stable and
fixed understandings of actors.
The term ‘actant’, developed in ANT to emphasise the lack of definite
clarity regarding who or what acts when we speak about action, is also
used by Boltanski (2012: 178). He uses it to interpret competences of
action that come in different variants and combine the worlds of
individu- als, groups, collectives or institutions. This understanding
underlines the radical uncertainty and “unease” in courses of action “that
threatens social arrangements and hence the fragility of reality”
(Boltanski 2011: 54).
‘Situation’ is one of Boltanski’s principle concepts, yet situations are
not understood simply as an enabling or constraining context of action. In
situ- ations, action occurs and relatively undefined goals and means are
formu- lated, modified and reformulated (Joas 1996: 154–161). Human
action is therefore deeply implicated in situations or controversies that are
always in need of interpretation by the actants involved (Blokker 2011:
252).
The pragmatist notion of ‘test’, borrowed from Latour (1988), is one
of Boltanski’s key concepts and sheds light on how actors resolve uncer-
tainty expressed in controversies. Tests in a general sense “refer to the way
reality is shaped” (Bogusz 2014: 135). Such ambiguous moments (situa-
tions troubles), during which feelings of awkwardness and anxiety arise in
involved participants (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 226), call for clarifi-
cation and justification: what is the situation at hand, who is involved,
and who is allowed to articulate claims? The imperative of justification
and the uncertainty of the situation can be much stronger than the
rationalist premise of justification as mere rhetorical action by powerful
actors.
Thirdly, Boltanski’s pragmatic actor model replaces Bourdieusian power
struggles of positioning in fields with the practical competences, critical
capacities and an “ordinary sense of justice” that actors mobilise in their
daily struggles to reach agreements (Boltanski 2011: 27–29). This does
not imply that, from a pragmatic point of view, the world is projected to
be harmonious. Instead, in complex societies, life tends to be trapped in
various sorts of disputes and controversies about what is going wrong
and what needs to be done. In such situations, the person “who realises
that something does not work rarely remains silent” (Boltanski and
Thévenot 1999: 360). Individuals who are involved in such situations are
subjected
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 91

to an imperative of justification, that is, actors prove their competence in

these moments of conflict and use higher normative principles (‘orders
of worth’) to defend their cause by justification and critique.
The justification and critique produced by actors in situations are not
random or without reason (Celikates 2006: 31). Instead, arguments have
to follow rules of acceptability that are based on these different orders of
worth, and which need to claim a contribution to a common good in
society (such as the volonté generale in the civic world, or profit in the
world of the market). While the term ‘orders of worth’ remains vaguely
defined, it intends to grasp those central grammars which provide legiti-
mate social bonds in democratic societies and which are culturally
embed- ded as regimes of justification. Thus, orders of worth provide
“repertoires of evaluation consisting of moral narratives and objects that
enable tests of worth” (Hanrieder 2016: 391).
The relation to a shared order of worth, culturally understood as contrib-
uting to the common good, makes it easier to accept a defeat in a ‘test’
situ- ation. The notion of practice refers to the practical and reflexive
competences of actors in which these different forms of justifications are
employed, and actors deal with a plurality of potential orders of worth in
particular situa- tions (Guggenheim and Potthast 2011: 160–161). A
key feature of such tests is their inherent character of contention
(Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 133), as disagreeing actors are often
uncertain as regards the worth of peo- ple in the situation at hand.
Effectively, this means that actors consciously decide when it is either
most appropriate to engage in justification – or open- ing one’s eyes – or
when it is best to not distract oneself by unproductive struggles – or
closing one’s eyes (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 232–236). In
summary, the pragmatic sociology of Boltanski is the IPT approach that
most particularly emphasises the normative and moral dimensions of
practice. However, it is important to note that Boltanski is not interested
in developing a normative theory of justice. Instead, his objective is to
unmask belief in universalism, to unveil pathologies in emerging orders
of justification – such as the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and
Chiapello 2007) – and to strengthen the role of critique by taking the critical
capacities of knowledgeable actors who invoke justice in the world seriously
(Boltanski 2012: 28). What makes his approach a genuinely practice-
oriented one is that the analytical separation between micro (situation)
and macro (orders) is permanently transcended through a focus on
changing practices of justifi- cation and critique. Justification becomes a
social practice founded on an
intersubjectively and normatively based process of ordering.
92 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

In IPT, Boltanski-inspired pragmatic sociology is increasingly used to

understand controversies about policy issues that are shaped by a plurality
and contradiction of normative orders, and to shed light on the social
dynamics of political judgments in international politics (e.g. Kornprobst
2014). If one interprets, for instance, the case of U.S. foreign policy from
the perspective of pragmatic sociology, the ‘war on terror’ transforms from
a hegemonic discourse to a fragile justificatory narrative that needs to be
tested by critical actors in everyday legitimacy struggles. The 2004
debate over torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq can be
recon- structed as a controversy between politicians, military personal,
journal- ists, NGOs, and ordinary citizens. These actors not only employ
different orders of justifications of international law, human rights or
military neces- sity, but also resources such as expertise, statistics, or visual
representations to support their legitimacy claims (Gadinger 2016).
By taking a micro-oriented view on the Senate Armed Services
Committee’s public hearings, it can be demonstrated that disputing
actors use distinct, and in the case of Senator Dayton and General Myers/
Secretary Rumsfeld, incommensurable principles of equivalence based on
different orders of worth (Gadinger 2016: 199–200). In other words,
actors employ different moral judgement criteria in definitions about the
good, the just, or the morally right thing to do, which includes distinct
culturally rooted grammars of legitimate behaviour.
It is a typical ‘reality test’, in that actors disagree on the reality as it is
(“[i]t’s a misunderstanding of the situation” in the words of Rumsfeld). In
doing so, actors use different measurement instruments, proofs, and
objects established in each order of worth. Statistics are used to strengthen
legitimacy claims by justifying actors when, for instance, a total of “seven
bad apples” in Abu Ghraib was compared to the number of American
troops in order to relativise the scandal as an “isolated incident”.
Meanwhile, critical actors use investigation reports as external expertise,
such as the International Committee of the Red Cross report on
systematic abuse in U.S. prisons, to strengthen their moral claims. While
critics’ main general argument was that the war on terror undermined
core democratic principles and contradicted the objective of defending the
national security of the United States in the long term, justifications by
members of the Bush administration were primarily based on rationalist
and technocratic orders of worth by using short-term objectives (state of
emergency, ‘we are at war’) and historical comparisons of earlier war
experiences. In this moment, the normative contestation cannot be
resolved as different rationalities in
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 93

modern democratic governance are revealed. The moral concern of the

actors who criticise the breach of the torture norm and the undermining
of civil liberties as the more significant common good contradicts the
overall emphasis on national security measures, meaning that democratic
and legal standards need to be downplayed during wartime to guarantee the
safety of ‘our troops’.
Finally, the analysis of the public hearings shows the moral standards
and shared values within the practice ‘official investigation’. Although
the repetitive, routinised statements of nearly all senators who honour
the merits of the US military could be interpreted as empty phrases,
they reveal the practical understanding and implicit rule of safeguarding
the US military as a credible institution that has long guaranteed national
security. While this tendency of the established practice can be criticised
as support of further militarisation, it sheds light on the criteria of how
to follow the rules as political actors, which, in this case, implies narrow
limits in formu- lating critique. While it is acceptable to sentence ‘seven
bad apples’ in the military at the lower level, it seems to be unacceptable
to risk the general credibility of the institution by bringing top-level
decision-makers such as former defence minister Donald Rumsfeld to
court (Gadinger 2016: 201). The United Nations (UN) is another site of
legitimacy struggles where practices of justification can be studied.
Holger Niemann (2015) argues that the UN Security Council is
narrowly interpreted in terms of great power politics, which neglects
its role as a site of social interaction. The Council’s legitimacy heavily
relies on practices of justification and critique by involving actors. That
is, a pragmatic view shifts from “legitimacy as a quality of the Council to
legitimacy as a claiming of moral rightness in the Council” (Niemann
2015: 1). Following Boltanski, even the veto, the Council’s most
distinctive feature, is not a simple tool of genuine power politics, but
rather can be understood as a ‘test’ between competing legiti- macy
claims based on a plurality of moral standards. The veto is public, and
needs to follow the imperative of justification. Using the case of the
2011/2012 vetoes on Syria, Niemann shows that the veto marks a
crucial moment for pragmatic analysis as legitimacy claims are mutually
tested, and different orders of worth such as ‘appropriate means’, ‘rule-
following’, and ‘responsibility’ are translated into practical reasoning.
The different references to responsibility exemplarily show the
“normative weight of being a responsible member of the international
community construc-
tively cooperating with other UN members” (Niemann 2015: 21).
94 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

While such a study is not blind to power, its main emphasis is on a

prag- matic notion of legitimacy as an unexplored dimension that
analytically grasps the simultaneity of moral dissent and consensus as
part of social ordering in a powerful organization. Analysing such
practices of justifica- tion helps to understand the dynamics of legitimacy
claims in an organisa- tion that is caught between diplomatic
conventions of politeness and the high politics of war and peace.
Tine Hanrieder (2016) similarly adopts Boltanski’s sociology to analyse
different moral conceptions of health as a highly valued, but essentially
contested issue in global politics. By using the framework of orders of
worth, she identifies four main conceptions based on a different idea of
health as a common good (survival, fairness, production, and spirit),
which therefore provide different criteria for distinguishing a virtuous sac-
rifice from a selfish pleasure. Hanrieder’s pragmatic view enables, on the
one hand, an understanding of the ambiguous and contested character of
political controversies on health issues. On the other hand, it changes the
notion of political identity in terms of self/other narratives in IR scholar-
ship by emphasising the plurality of orders of worth as moral narratives
that connect visions of universal humankind to ideas about moral worth
and deficiency.
Another source of inspiration for practice-oriented research in IR,
par- ticularly in IPE and critical governance research, is Boltanski and
Chiapello’s (2007) major work on the ‘new spirit of capitalism’. In this
research, they identify and investigate an emerging order of justification
based on managerial capitalism. Matthew Eagleton-Pierce (2014), for
instance, explains the early genesis of the policy notion of governance in
relation to ideological changes in a ‘new spirit of capitalism’. For
Eagleton- Pierce (2014: 6), the emergence of governance, such as the
formulation of a ‘governance agenda’ by the World Bank from the 1980s,
can be under- stood in light of a relationship between political crises,
social critique, and justificatory arguments around security and fairness
claims that form part of an ideological spirit. The new spirit of capitalism
therefore provides a flexible vocabulary for politicians to legitimise
neoliberal policy changes.
As Christian Scheper (2015) shows in the case of corporate
governance discourses, there is a strong recourse to human rights
awareness as being perceived in terms of ‘good’ business. However,
Scheper demonstrates that this shift towards a concept of corporate
responsibility for human rights represents the capacity of capitalism to
absorb fundamental criticism and incorporate the very values that formed
the ground for critique.
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 95

Vando Borghi (2011) draws on the “new spirit of capitalism” – a term

by which Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) identified an emerging order of
justification based on managerial capitalism – to describe current transfor-
mations in European welfare capitalism. According to Borghi (2011:
323), the two pillars of EU welfare capitalism that serve as crucial
institu- tional guidelines – employability and activation – have emerged
as devices for a paradoxical torsion in a process of individualisation. This
leads to a growing shifting and weakening of the meaning of ‘public’; it is
in turn being increasingly replaced by devices and models of social
regulation based on direct and horizontal interaction between
individuals in a net- work of coordination that goes beyond any
institutional mediation, and is therefore at great risk of de-politicisation
(Borghi 2011: 334).
In a similar line of argumentation, Frank Gadinger and Taylan Yildiz
(2012) argue that attempts to solve the European financial crisis in the late
2000s indicate shifts in institutional politics to network capitalist
regimes of justification. In their reading, the financial crisis represents a
moral dis- course that involves an irreducible plurality of normative
principles. By using the framework of orders of worth, they identify
different forms of test in the arena of the European Parliament. In the
parliament, actors compete in claiming legitimacy but avoid using any
‘existential test’ in the form of radical critique. Project-based orders of
justification and rhetorical patterns of New Public Management become
visible in the parliamentary justifications and critiques. In these
justifications, the financial crisis is transformed from a policy issue and a
deeper crisis of identity to a manage- ment problem.
Finally, Søren Jagd (2011) demonstrates that pragmatic sociology is
suitable for empirical studies that shed light on the co-existence of com-
peting rationalities and institutional logics in organisations. He argues that
the framework can be used through both a synchronic perspective to
describe co-existing orders of worth in particular organisations, as well
as a diachronic perspective to focus on ‘justification work’ by studying
the processes of critique, justifications, testing, or compromising
performed by actors (Jagd 2011: 348). The links to practice-oriented IR
research on international organisations (e.g. Barnett and Finnemore
2004; Best 2012) are quite obvious.
As Paul Blokker and Andrea Brigenthi (2011: 283–284) rightly argue,
one of the promises of pragmatic sociology is to challenge monistic
assumptions of political order that downplay the plurality of
legitimations used by actors. Instead, politics is understood as an
interplay of different
96 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

forms of justification, distribution, constitution, and defiance.

Contingency, uncertainty, conflict and the lack of both closure and
completion of politics is emphasised. In pragmatic sociology, the “social
world does not appear as a place of domination suffered passively and
unconsciously but more like a space intersected by a multitude of
disputes, critiques, disagreements and attempts to produce local
agreements” (Jagd 2011: 345–346).
Contestedness, ambiguity, and contradictions that arise between
multi- tudes of legitimate claims in situations of conflict become visible in
empiri- cal studies drawing on pragmatic sociology. More generally,
pragmatic sociology provides us, as Anders Blok (2013: 495) rightly
notes, with an original theoretical matrix for “registering the grammars
of moral evalua- tion, as actors search for the common good in everyday
situations of con- flict and coordination”. Compromises can always be
reached, however, although they are not immediately apparent in logics
of action or the per- sonal disposition of actors.
Compromises and agreements are always fragile and provide only a
minimal notion of stability in social life. The reproductive understanding
of practice in Bourdieu’s work is therefore substituted by the creative
effort for actors to adapt, modify and arrange their practices of justifica-
tion and critique in relation to the situation of conflict. For pragmatists,
there is a high degree of uncertainty that makes social reproduction and
stable order nearly impossible. Sebastian Schindler and Tobias Wille
(2015), for instance, recently criticised Pouliot’s pioneering
Bourdieusian work on diplomatic practices in NATO-Russia relations
(2010b) for its strong emphasis on the stabilising habitus, ultimately
underestimating moments of uncertainty such as the period after the
Cold War.
Such debates are exemplary discussions between ‘critical’ and ‘prag-
matic’ scholars. The pragmatic view on practice marks a clear shift away
from the world of practice theorists focused on power and regularity,
such as Bourdieu. This world is perceived by pragmatic scholars as an
unlivable world, since it seems to be entirely governed by power and the
reproduc- tion of stable hierarchies and classes. However, as Peter
Wagner (1999: 349) rightly remarks, the world of Boltanski is “an equally
unlivable world, since it appeared as if people were constantly engaged in
justice and that they were always in action”. Indeed, while pragmatic
sociology rediscovers the critical capacities of actors, it tends to
underestimate the restricting nature of power structures and institutions
(Honneth 2010: 382). The pertinent question, therefore, becomes
whether situations can really be conceptualised as an open space in which
people interact free from ‘fields of
 APPROACHES IN INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE THEORY II 97

power’ and are driven primarily by their critical and creative capabilities.
The notion of compromise happening in action remains vague in concep-
tual terms, and needs further clarification.
Pragmatic sociologists are currently broadening their conceptual appa-
ratus from justification to other modes of action, such as love or violence
(Boltanski 2012; Thévenot 2007). Until now, Thévenot’s promising
research programme as part of the ‘convention school’, which generally
analyses economic, social, and political conventions that regulate uncer-
tain coordination (e.g. Thévenot 2007), has remained overlooked in IR
research. This can be seen as further engagement with a general social
theory of conflicts. However, this ambitious scope does not make it
easier for IR scholars to translate this vocabulary into the research
agenda of IPT. The adoption of pragmatic sociology to study legitimacy
struggles and their “practices of legitimation” (Reus-Smit 2007) thus
seems to be the most promising path.
Boltanski’s approach provides a valuable tool for analysing political
controversies, as it gives us a detailed account of the regimes of justification
employed by actors and their normative backgrounds. This does not
mean that practice theorists are tricked by the ‘cheap talk’ of powerful
actors. On the contrary, the embeddedness of normative principles in
practices unveils the hypocrisy of moral claims and how they obscure
relations of power and domination.
Boltanski’s suggestion (2011: 103–110) to interpret legitimacy strug-
gles in different kinds of ‘tests’ could be helpful, in analytical terms, to
differentiate between stabilising practices and forms of critique as triggers
of a renewal of social orders. The deep trench between pragmatic sociol-
ogy and Bourdieu’s praxeology should not be overstated. As Anna
Leander (2011) suggests, the problems raised by pragmatic sociology
against Bourdieu’s promise could be used as a basis for a non-
structuralist reading of Bourdieu, and to broaden empirical use of
Bourdieusian con- cepts in IR. Moreover, while Boltanski’s major work
on the concept of justification resembles Latour’s aversion to
structuralism, he has more recently attempted to reconcile his pragmatic
approach with Bourdieu’s critical project by taking into account issues of
resource inequalities, insti- tutions, and complex forms of domination
(Gadinger 2016: 189). As a matter of fact, he now describes his work as a
‘sociology of emancipation’ (Boltanski 2011).
Finally, pragmatic sociology should not be seen as a dogmatic
research programme, as Boltanski is more driven by new empirical
research topics
98 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

than a thorough refinement of his conceptual vocabulary. Nevertheless,

his work still provides an inspiring source for practice-oriented research.
Whereas his recent book Mysteries and Conspiracies (2014) explores the
practices of reality construction and its implications for sociological inquiry
by analysing influential spy novels, detective stories, and conspiracy theo-
ries in our society, he has also started a new research project on
consump- tion and value appreciation in capitalism (Boltanski and
Esquerre 2017) that expands on his earlier work on the ‘new spirit of
capitalism’. Both studies bear relevance for IR scholars seeking to tackle
questions related to global surveillance in critical security studies and the
survival of global capitalism in international political economy.

NOTE
1. Nexon and Pouliot (2013), for instance, suggest that ANT is an “approach”
or a “framework” distinct from relational theories and practice theory,
although they suggest that the three share many resemblances and
intentions.
 CHAPTER 5

Conceptual Challenges of International

Practice Theory

The seven approaches of IPT discussed in the preceding chapters repre-

sent clusters of scholars, vocabularies, ideas, empirical studies and ques-
tions. Our introduction to the core approaches has shown that each of
them has their own advantages, as well as certain weaknesses. In this chap-
ter, we consider how the approaches relate to one another, and how
their relationships spur exciting new questions for future research.
To explore these relations, we focus on a set of challenges. By chal-
lenges, we mean issues that are contentious, present dilemmas or para-
doxes, and IPT scholars take different positions on. The approaches
outlined address these challenges via different routes. These differences
must be appreciated as creative tensions; rather than playing the approaches
against each other – suggesting that one is right and the other is wrong –
or proposing that one has to choose between them, we argue that the
contradictions or even antagonisms amongst them provide fruitful heuris-
tics for advancing the IPT project. Reflecting on these challenges
provides us not only with a range of interesting puzzles, but also with an
outline of some of the main issues on the IPT agenda.
The challenges we discuss below are major ontological puzzles, and as
such not necessarily genuine to practice theory, but of wider relevance in
the social sciences. However, practice theory addresses each of these
chal- lenges, and this interplay is what we like to explore.
We begin with a discussion of the tension between an understanding of
practice as a social regularity and as a fluid entity. This leads us to the
question

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100 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

in how far IPT can make statements on the contingency and change of practi-
cal configurations. Next, we address the question of how to conceptualise the
scale and size of practice. This is largely a question of (ontological)
prioritisa- tion that is nonetheless fundamental for a discipline that is
primarily con- cerned with the international and the global. We continue
with a reflection on different standpoints towards three core dimensions;
that is, how to think about the normativity of practice, how the material
dimension of practices (bodies, technology, artefacts) is prioritised, and
how to conceptualise power and critique.
Our discussion is certainly not exhaustive. Further issues of importance,
such as how to link theory and empirics, or what it implies to be
reflexive, are discussed in the next chapter, where we consider the
methodology of practice. Other concerns, whilst worthy of attention, do
not receive sub- stantial treatment here.1

5.1 ORDER aND CHaNGE

One of the initial motives for developing practice theories was to gain a
better understanding of the dynamic interplay between order and
change (Neumann 2002; Spiegel 2005a). The reconsideration of agency,
change and transformation in the context of practice theories has led to
new dis- cussions on ontology driven by a common objective of
transcending the dichotomy of agency and structure (Spiegel 2005b: 11,
25). By locating the site of the social in practices, rather than
individuality/agency or social- ity/structure, practice theories have a
different understanding of social order. They understand forms of social
and political order as temporal pro- cesses, in which order is continuously
produced and reproduced by prac- tices. Orders and structures, in practice
theoretical terms, are largely formed by routinisation, which implies their
temporality. Routinised social prac- tices occur in a sequence of time;
“social order is thus basically social repro- duction” (Reckwitz 2002: 255).
It is therefore more meaningful to refer to the verb ‘ordering’, than the
noun ‘order’. Contrary to the logic of the vocabulary of agency and
structure, order and change need to be under- stood as part of one
continuous stream of practice, and not as opposites.
Practices are repetitive patterns, but they are also permanently displac-
ing and shifting. Though they are dispersed, dynamic and continuously
rearranging in ceaseless movement, they are also reproducing, organised
and structured clusters. This morphing constellation forces practice
theo- rists to be particularly aware of the continuous tension between
the dynamic, continuously changing character of practice on the one side,
and
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE TH
 EORY
101

the identification of stable, regulated patterns, routines and reproduction

on the other. Practices, as Rouse (2006: 599) phrases it, can “range from
ephemeral doings to stable long-term patterns of activity”.
This tension caused by the dual nature of practices defies easy solutions.
It requires attention to the interaction between both the emergent, inno-
vative and the repetitive, reproducing sides of practice. This leads to one
of the most disputed questions posed by practice theories scholars: how
can the dual quality of practices between reproduction and renewal be
conceptualised? Can practice theory serve both analytical purposes and
explain continuity as well as change? The practice approaches discussed all
take stances on this question, providing differing suggestions of how to
adequately grapple with the interplay of order and change. One should
not expect an inevitable conceptual ‘solution’, however. A closer look at
how practice approaches conceive of practical reconfigurations and trans-
formations is needed.
To some degree, a fault line runs through IPT with regards to this
question. On one side of this divide are theorists such as Bourdieu,
Foucault and Wenger, and on the other relationalist and pragmatist
schol- ars such as Boltanski or Latour. The former theorists are
interested in larger formations of domination and historical processes;
they tend to focus on regularity and risk to be read as underplaying the
potential for transformation. For Bourdieu, repetition and reproduction
is the norm; shifts are therefore considered rare and require a
revolutionary event. Actor network theorists or pragmatic sociologists
emphasise processes and relations and take almost the opposite position,
claiming that stability, rather than change, requires explanation. The
world is seen to be con- stantly emerging and shifting; practices are taken
as inherently innovative, experimental and erratic. As a result, for these
theorists, any context of action is a situation of uncertainty.
This divide is also reflected in the bewildering array of structural
meta- phors that have been proposed,2 many of which are (intentionally
or unin- tentionally) under-theorised. Bourdieu’s notion of the field is
certainly the most developed concept. Drawing on it assumes that a
distinct structure exists over time, driven by a unique doxa and
distribution of resources. Such an understanding of structure is useful if
one is interested in the dis- tribution of power among different agents
and their relative positionality (e.g. Williams 2012). Drawing on the field
concept is to assume that a fairly homogeneous structure with boundary
and identity practices can be identified. The logic of this structure then
becomes an object of study. In contrast to other concepts in practice
theory, Bourdieu’s structural metaphor
102 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

is the most coherent. Significant similarities, in this sense, can be found

in the community metaphor most prominently in Wenger’s notion of
‘com- munities of practice’. Here, the assumption is that practice is
organised in community structures. Such communities are grasped as
having a stable core (or ‘repertoire’ in Wenger’s words) and relying on a
significant amount of identity and boundary work by which the
community distinguishes itself from others.
The other side of the spectrum of structural metaphors is occupied by
notions that draw on the pragmatist obsession with contingency, fluctua-
tion and situations. Examples include the Latourian notion of ‘actor-
networks’, Schatzki’s ‘bundles and meshes’, Foucault’s ‘apparatuses’, but
also the Deleuzian concept of the ‘rhizomatic assemblage’ (Acuto and
Curtis 2013). These are almost chaotic notions of structure and order,
centering on multiplicity, overlap, complexity, incoherence and
contradic- tions between structural elements. As Marcus and Saka (2006:
102) phrase it, such conceptualisations are employed “with a certain
tension, balanc- ing, and tentativeness where the contradictions between
the ephemeral and the structural, and between the structural and the
unstably heteroge- neous create almost a nervous condition for analytic
reason.”
The advantage of such metaphors is their genuine openness to the
vari- ous possibilities of orderliness. They should not be understood as
anti- structural notions, yet they foreground the ephemeral and stress
that weight has to be put on empirical, situation-specific research in
order to understand how ordered (or disordered) the world is. The price
to be paid for such notions is, firstly, that it becomes almost impossible
to lay out grand histories of panoramic scale and the power dynamics
they entail. Secondly, employing such notions creates inherent
contradictions for the presentation of academic research, given that
academic research only becomes intelligible if phrased in relatively
coherent narratives.
What are the implications for theorising change? In IR, change has
been conceptualised by realists as the outcome of revolutionary wars
and the redistribution of capabilities they imply, while constructivists
have made the argument that change is caused by the rise of norms, or
the work of experts, entrepreneurs and other actors.3
On a conceptual level, most practice theorists agree with constructivists
that change arises through agency. However, as Latour (2005: 51) right-
fully suggests, how to conceptualise agency could be “the most difficult
problem there is in philosophy”, especially if one, in contrast to the
major- ity of constructivists, does not want to restrict the concept to
humans and wants to avoid subscribing to methodological
individualism.
 CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 103

Practice theories have been described as starting with the idea that
the “world is filled not, in the first instance, with facts and observations,
but with agency” (Pickering 1995: 6). The world, then, is “continually
doing things” (Pickering 1995: 6). When social order is realised through
a con- tinuous stream of practices, agency plays the role of the central
motor of that steady current. For Schatzki (2002: 234) agency is “the
chief dynamo of social becoming”. As discussed further below, for many
practice theo- rists, notably actor network theory, ‘doings’ are also
carried out by non- humans. One may, therefore, also speak about
‘material agency’.
Considering material agency does not assume that objects, things or
artefacts act intentionally. It implies that forces of change may also be
trig- gered by material elements (Pickering 1995: 17–18). In the study of
prac- tice, it often becomes difficult to decide who or what are the main
driving forces of change. No cultural element in the interweaving
relationship between the human and the material world is immune to
change in emer- gent transformations of practices (Pickering 1995: 206–
207).
For Schatzki (2002: 234), constant doing must not be equated with
change. He distinguishes between minor adjustments and major
ruptures in practice; a minor adjustment refers to the principle of
indexicality (Nullmeier and Pritzlaff 2009) and the fact that any new
situation requires adjusting and re-arranging the practice within it.
Indexicality indicates the embeddedness of meaning in practical action,
and emphasises that any form of social order arises from the situative
circumstances of their use. From a practice theory perspective, “all
expressions and actions are indexi- cal” (Nicolini 2013: 138). Practice
theorists who are principally interested in maintenance work in everyday
life focus on activities in which practices are perpetuated and reordered
minimally; they regard these gradual muta- tions in the wave of doings as
the main driving forces of social change.
In contrast, a major rupture refers to those moments in which
practices fully break down. This can be because of their failure, the rise
of a newly emergent practice, the invention of a new object, or a new
encounter between practices.
As Adler and Pouliot (2011a: 18–19) argue, there are different general
frameworks that are useful in analysing how practice generates transforma-
tions in social life. They differentiate between the option of focusing on a
practice’s lifecycle, which refers to a genealogy and historical evolution
of a practice over time and space, and the option of analysing the
interplay and shifting relations between practices. Practice theorists
following the second option are interested in the “permanent state of
connectivity and tension inside a constellation of practices that fuels
transformation” (Adler and Pouliot 2011a: 27).
104 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

The change of diplomatic practices in Pouliot’s studies of NATO and

its relationship to Russia is a good case study for the first option in
analysing the dynamic historicity and contingent processes of
transformations in secu- rity communities (Pouliot 2010a, b). The
Bourdieusian-inspired studies in the field of European security are good
examples of political transformations that emerge from tensions between
different sets of practices in diplomacy, security expertise and technology
innovation (Berling 2012; Adler-Nissen 2014). Finally, it can also make
sense to combine both approaches and grasp the recursivity of practice in
producing its own transformation.
The role of change remains a major challenge in practice theories. To
make matters more complicated, rich and explicit conceptual discussions
on these difficult issues are quite rare – Schatzki (2002: 189–264) is one
of the few exceptions. For some approaches, change is a variation stemming
from unexpected confusion and events in the reproduction process,
while for others, change is constitutive of practice itself. As Reckwitz
(2004b: 51) correctly points out, there is, however, no theoretical reason
that prac- tice theorists should be forced to accept either the
reproductive or the erratic character of practice as the norm. He suggests
that this issue needs to be turned into the analytical question of which
practices, and corre- sponding conditions, take on an erratic or a
reproductive nature. In other words, the attempt to find a universalist
answer to the ‘nature’ of practices as either stable or ephemeral is
fundamentally misleading (Schä fer 2013: 43). In this context, Rouse
(2006: 507) argues compellingly from a philo- sophical point of view that
“there is of course good reason to think that different social practices
might vary in their stability over time, such that the extent to which
social practices sustain a relatively stable background for individual
action would be a strictly empirical question, admitting of no useful
general philosophical treatment apart from characterising some of the
considerations that might generate continuity or change”.
The question of whether a practice is an ephemeral phenomenon or
estab- lished in long-term patterns is primarily an empirical one.
Understanding when and how practices transform under which
conditions, consequently remains one of the main challenge for future
studies in IPT.
A number of authors have proposed models to enable such empirical
studies. Reasoning that too much attention has been given to the
indexical and habitual side of practice, Ted Hopf (2017) argues for the
importance of identifying those situations in which we would expect
change to occur. Starting out from the pragmatist model that problematic
situations trigger reflexivity and deliberate thought, he proposes a
taxonomy of eight such
 CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 105

situations.4 For Hopf, we are to expect to see reflexivity at work in situa-

tions that are characterised by meaningful difference and the availability of
plausible alternatives to proceed in practice, for instance. As he argues,

for change to occur, there must be a discursive fit between a set of novel
ideas and the already-existing, mostly taken-for-granted, set of ideas that
informs the daily life-world of average people. […] Too little difference will
go unnoticed as it is easily assimilable to prevailing beliefs and taken-for-
granted common sense. However, too much difference, understood as
either unintelligible or excessively counter-normative, will also be ineffective.
(Hopf 2017: 11)

While Hopf’s taxonomy is a useful starting point for research, his com-
mitment to a binary of two modes of action, action as habit driven
routine on the one side, and action as reflexive and deliberate choice
remains problematic. Rather than transcending the divide, his proposal
risks per- petuating it.
Other useful proposals can particularly be identified in organisation
studies, in which change has been one of the major research problems
for decades. Here, practice theorists have developed a number of useful
sug- gestions that provide inspiration for IPT. Yanow and Tsoukas
(2009), for instance, make a similar move to Hopf, arguing for
distinguishing between situations. However, instead of perpetuating
the binary mode of habit/ routine vs. thought/change, they offer a
description starting out with the concept of reflective practice. They
grasp moments of change through the notion of ‘surprise’ and proceed to
differentiate between the temporality of surprise. As they suggest,
surprise is often linked to the material and the artefacts that a practice is
part of; the material talks back and does not allow one to proceed. On this
basis, they distinguish between routine activity and three forms of
interrupted activity through surprise and disturbances: ‘mal- function’ that
can be addressed immediately, ‘mild temporary breakdown’ that
requires deliberate attention to the task, and ‘persistent breakdown’ that
requires reflective planning and the consideration of alternative actions.
Other organisation scholars make the opposite move, and argue in
favour of empirically investigating the work required to stabilise a new
practice or to prevent the total breakdown of a practice. Gherardi and
Perrotta (2010), for instance, demonstrate how three modes of work
stabilise a practice: firstly, ‘limitation’ implies that a new practice is
delib- eratively limited to the context and situations to which it would be
appro- priate, secondly, the categories of the new practices are defined
and
106 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

controversies black boxed through ‘rhetorical closure’, and finally, the

practice is ‘anchored in technology’.
Another example is the thick ethnographic study of a historical selec-
tion practice by Lok and de Rond (2013). They argue for turning the
focus to ‘maintenance work’ and questioning why change does not occur.
How can a practice be fixed and kept going and a total breakdown
prevented? Investigating a range of cases of practice breakdowns, they
develop a model of maintenance work that distinguishes between two
basic forms of breakdown and link them to three modes of maintenance
work (normalisation, negotiation and custodial work). Minor
breakdowns require ‘containment work’, while major breakdowns, in
their case the outcome of an accumulation of minor events, require
‘restoration work’.
As these examples demonstrate, the challenge of change and orderliness
can be turned into a productive starting point for practice-driven research.
The above models provide useful categorical systems to facilitate research.
One needs to be aware of the relativity of the distinctions made in these
models, however, as what constitutes a minor or a major breakdown, or
a breakdown at all, is often a matter of positionality, that is, a matter of
from where one investigates practices, as well as what breadth or scale of
prac- tices in space and time one investigates. While from the
perspective of a participant in an event, such as the failure of an
everyday technology, might be a major breakdown, this is not
necessarily the case if one zooms out of situations and into history. It is
to the question of scale and size that we turn next.

5.2 SCaLE aND SIZE

The majority of IR scholarship is interested in formations which appear
large in scope. Whether it is international order, the international
system, ‘global’ politics, regimes, international organisation, regional
integration, state behaviour, or professions such as diplomacy and law,
these are phe- nomena that appear large and ‘macro’ in scale. In contrast,
IPT is often interpreted as a move of going ‘micro’. As Ty Solomon and
Brent Steele (2017) have argued, the turn to practices is triggered by the
disappoint- ment over the focus on global structures and systems and
the failures of ‘grand theory’ to provide an account of global life. In that
regard, the discussion in IR clearly differs from those social science
disciplines which, for decades, have been heavily influenced by the
micro-focus of symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. Within
organisation studies, or
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 107
science and technology studies, for instance, practice theory was initially
introduced to re-work the assumptions of existing micro studies, but
with a growing dissatisfaction over a localist focus, the tendency is to
increas- ingly zoom out and go macro.
IR will certainly benefit from ‘going micro’ further by paying more
attention to face-to-face interactions, routines and the situations and
contexts that action is embedded in. However, this should not imply los-
ing sight of the larger configurations, institutions and structures the
disci- pline has focused on for decades. In its stead, practice theory is an
invitation to rethink the consequences of working at a distinct scale, and
what is implied by concepts of institutions and structures. Practice
theory has developed different approaches to the issue, yet the problem
of scale, or perhaps better, scaling, will remain a matter of debate and
will demand new creative answers. IPT, given its empirical focus and
disciplinary his- tory, is particularly well positioned to provide
interesting insights for the larger inter-disciplinary debate on practices.
One of the benefits of practice theories is that they do not take con-
structions of scale for granted. The intention of practice theory is to keep
ontology ‘flat’ and re-conceptualise the ideas behind constructions of
scale. Distinctions such as micro (face-to-face interactions, and what peo-
ple do and say), meso (routines), macro (institutions), local (situations),
regional (contexts), or global (universals), are not to be taken as natural
categories. Indeed, there is no thing such as micro, macro, local or global;
they are not naturally given. They are constructs of social scientists who
adopt different strategies to try to make them so. Practice theory therefore
aims at allowing “the transcendence of the division between such levels,
such as that we are able to understand practice as taking place
simultane- ously both locally and globally, being both unique and
culturally shared, ‘here and now’ as well as historically constituted and
path-dependent” (Miettinen et al. 2009: 1310). The argument is that all
social phenomena whether large or small, micro or macro have the same
basic ingredients. How, then, does one transcend scale and work within
a flat ontology?
One answer from practice theory is that the concept of practice is
open in scale. To study practice does not prescribe a scale in time or
space. Therefore, it is equally appropriate to study a seemingly large
scale, such as Foucault’s studies of modernity, or histories of practices of
war, as it would be meaningful to study practices with a different zoom
on a distinct policy, let’s say NATO’s military doctrine, or an everyday
interaction, such as guarding a military camp. Using the concept of
practice does not suggest
108 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

a distinct level of aggregation. As Frank Nullmeier and Tanja Pritzlaff

(2009: 10) have argued, this is not least because the borders of one prac-
tice with another are undetermined. Practices are often nested in one
another; their inter-relation is complex.
The range of structural metaphors we have already introduced are
specific attempts to study the linkages between practices. Notions such as
‘fields’, ‘communities’, ‘bundles’, ‘actor-networks’, ‘apparatuses’, or
‘assemblages’ are means of grasping how practices intersect and how
these play out in multiple places, how they are situated and remain shared
across situations.
Think about the practice of playing professional football. Football is
played around the world every day. There are numerous different leagues;
for example, the German Bundesliga is not quite the same as the English
Premier League, or Spain’s La Liga. A match in FC Barcelona’s 100,000-
seat Nou Camp stadium, famous for its fan culture and atmosphere, is a
very different experience to a game in the smallest Premier League sta-
dium, AFC Bournemouth’s 12,000-capacity Dean Curt. Obviously, each
match plays out differently. There have also been significant changes
over time, as the sport has become more physically demanding,
sophisticated new tactics have been developed, as well as new footwear
or analytical technology. Despite all these differences, however, the game
played is the same, as is what the practice assembles, ranging from boots
to jerseys, pitches and goals, to the 22 players on the field. We know that
it is a foot- ball game when we see it. To understand the practice of
football there is no need to argue for a macro or micro dimension.
There are other consequences, the first being that we do not necessarily
have to study each and every football game ever played, or every
stadium around the world, to understand the practice. The study of
practice does not necessarily entail studying the complexity of practice in
its entirety. As argued by Schatzki (2005), it is often meaningful to
develop overviews of fields of practice; this does not necessarily or always
require tracking and registering “the potentially labyrinthine complexity”
(Schatzki 2005: 477). In many cases, it is desirable and feasible to provide
overviews refer- ring not to the details of practice, but to larger
formations. For Schatzki, such overviews operate on a higher plane of
abstraction, “in the sense of extraction from a fuller reality” (Schatzki
2005: 477). Analysts might well prefer to describe phenomena on a
broader, more abstract scale, rather than starting from a detailed
description of situations.
The second consequence is to consider how research can benefit from
exploring the interlinkages between sites. Though we might limit our
research to the differences between football games in England and Spain,
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE TH
 EORY
109

it would certainly be useful to study sites other than the game itself, and
investigate what happens in locker rooms, training camps, club offices or
the headquarters of football associations. Anthropologists have
described such a perspective as ‘multi-sited’ (Marcus 1995). 5 The
concern becomes to research “the logics of association and connection
among sites” on the basis of “chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or
juxtapositions of loca- tions” (Marcus 1995: 105).
An important proposal on how to think about the linkages between
sites has been made by Karin Knorr Cetina (2005, Knorr Cetina and
Bruegger 2002) who argues for the prevalence of what she calls
“complex global microstructures”. Knorr Cetina’s starting point is to
introduce a new understanding of what it means to be present in a
situation, or ‘response presence’. This form of presence is not based on
physical locality or visual recognition by others as assumed in classical
understandings of face-to-face situations. Instead, participants encounter
each other through mediated forms of modern communication
technology. They react to each other on screen, despite being in distant
locations, which creates global microstructures through this interaction.
Knorr Cetina and Bruegger (2002) use this conceptual vocabulary to
understand how the global financial markets are produced on screens in
connected locations. Knorr Cetina (2005) demonstrates how the same
concepts can also shed light on global terrorist networks and the
coordination of their actions. This is one productive proposal for how
one can grasp the relationship between sites in a flat ontology without
introducing overarching macro dimensions.
Distinctions of scale, such as micro-macro or local-global distinctions
are dependent on statements. They are the outcome of descriptions by
social scientists and others who introduce them and categorise phenomena
in them. Another important strategy that practice theorists have adopted is
to turn the making of scales and levels into an explicit empirical object of
study. Authors including Tsing (2005) and Latour (1988, 2005) have
shown how actors combine heterogeneous elements to make the global
and the universal. They have foregrounded the work of bureaucrats,
scien- tists and activists in creating scale by framing things as universal
and inter- national. The empiricist route of focusing on the making of
scale and the emergence of scale hybridity as the main object of study is a
promising one. Not every practice-driven investigation will focus
primarily on scale- making, however. Even if this focus is not explicit, it is
important to recognise that practice theorists not only challenge
traditional understand- ings of scale, they also introduce their own
politics of scale. They construct scale by introducing structural concepts
and by situating practice in larger
110 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

containers. It therefore remains a matter of debate whether, contrary to

the rhetoric of flat ontology, the containers and structural concepts de
facto imply the introduction of meso or macro categories.
It is also noteworthy, as Nicolini (2017a) notes, that not all practice
theorists embrace flat ontologies. This particularly relates to Bourdieusian
approaches, which insist that there are macro-phenomena outside of prac-
tices, such as social classes or the state. One of the reasons for their insis-
tence on macro structures is related to the question of power. Indeed, as
we discuss further below (5.5), flat ontologies can be on shaky ground
when it comes to approaching ‘power’.
In any case, while it will be important for IR to go more micro, this
does not imply embracing a romantic localism and restricting IPT to the
study of face-to-face situations. In its stead, analysing how the micro is
nested in the macro, how different situations are interwoven and how
scale is made and grand historical categories are created will remain a major
task for IPT in the future. It is a challenge that is linked to all the others,
to the question of change, as discussed above, but also the questions of
power, or theory and generalisation discussed later in this book (Chap.
6). Paying attention to scale is an important objective, not least as
through its experience in the study of large constellations, IR scholarship
can make significant contributions to the inter-disciplinary debate.

5.3 NORMaTIVITY aND aCCOUNTaBILITY

Practices are normative. They include evaluations and value judgments,
such as whether a practice has been performed well, or they might
suggest ought-to rules of how one should behave in a distinct situation.
The widely received notion of practices as ‘competent performances’ that
Adler and Pouliot proposed in reference to Barnes (2001), for instance,
implies a strong normative dimension. As they argue, “the structured
dimension of practice stems not only from repetition, but also, and in fact
primarily, from groups of individuals’ tendency to interpret their
performance along similar standards”, which can be “done correctly or
incorrectly” (Adler and Pouliot 2011c: 7–8). This implies that normative
evaluation is a fun- damental aspect of practice, as its (in)competence is
never inherent, but rather attributed in and through social relations
appraisable in public by an audience.
The importance of the normative and evaluative dimension of practice
remains a contentious issue, however. Developing the normativity of prac-
tice is, furthermore, an important driver of further exploring the links
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 111
between IPT and other approaches in IR theory. The relation between
practices and norms, and how to study them, is a shared concern of prac-
tice scholars and norm researchers. In IR, normativity is usually related
to constructivist norm research. Such studies investigate how norms
struc- ture behaviour, how actors are socialised, how norms are diffused
and translated and under which conditions individuals or collective
entities comply with these.
The majority of constructivist norm approaches, however, rely on the
concept of homo sociologicus. They often start with the assumptions of
methodological individualism or tend to assume that norms, values and
rules are rather static entities that have a live independent from activities
and situations. In such an understanding, actors are mainly norm and
rule followers, and their behaviour can be explained as a causal process.
As more fully discussed in Chap. 2, such a determinist understanding of
rule- following actors has little in common with practice theory.
From the practice theoretical perspective, obeying a rule is a social prac-
tice that is rooted in everyday activities, mutual practical understandings
and interpretations of the demands of a situation. Such an understanding
of rule-following goes back historically to a line of reasoning established in
the work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Both gave priority to practice,
and argued that meaning and language, and hence norms and rules, have
to be understood in use. Practice theories share Wittgenstein’s (2009:
§ 114) core assumption that “‘following a rule’ is a practice”. Following
rules and using language require a reliance on background knowledge,
practical understandings, routinisation and situated learning of how to use
language or apply a rule in practice. Wittgenstein’s assumption clarifies the
definition of practices as competent performances. It reminds us, firstly,
that terms like competency and correctness are always established within a
community and, secondly, that these terms imply a standard against which
practice can be judged (Gross Stein 2011: 88).
Practice theories therefore offer conceptual alternatives to the often
incoherent positions one finds in constructivist norm research in IR.
Such research all too often ignores that rules and norms are always in
need of interpretation in distinct situations. To some degree, the practice
theoretical reasoning on normativity continues a line of theorising in IR
that has developed Wittgensteinian insights, but hardly reached the
(constructiv- ist) IR theory core. Notably, the work of Kratochwil (1989)
and Hopf (2002) presents projects aimed at understanding the link
between norms and practice by emphasising that the interpretation of
rules and meanings is grounded in practice. Both authors stress that
norms and rules should
112 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

be understood from below, and that attention needs to be paid to the

practical reasoning of actors in situations. As Kratochwil (1989: 61)
argued, “actors are not only programmed by rules and norms, but they
produce and change by their practice the normative structures by which
they are able to act, share meanings, communicate intentions, criticise
claims, and justify choices.” Hopf (2002: 12) described this departure
from more conventional constructivism in similar terms: “[t]he exclusive
search for norms and rules necessarily precludes the recovery of everyday
practice, but the search for everyday practice necessarily will recover the
explicit invocation of norms”. The emergence of norms is based on prac-
tices and not otherwise. Practice-oriented researchers therefore prefer the
term ‘normativity’, as it emphasises the fluid relationship between norms
and practices (e.g. Schatzki 2002: 80; Frega 2014).
Antje Wiener’s (2008, 2014) theory of norm contestation represents
another attempt to understand norms as a social activity, in which
norma- tivity implies a continuous re-enacting of the normative
structure of meaning-in-use by a multiplicity of agents. Wiener’s work is
in line with other critical norm scholars (e.g. Epstein 2012; Niemann and
Schillinger 2016), who have begun to focus less on the effects of norms
and instead turn their attention to processes, practices, and actions in
international politics in which normativity is negotiated, contested, and
embedded. Although these researchers tend not to explicitly frame their
approaches within the Wittgensteinian tradition, their perspective
enquires how and by whom normativity is produced, and therefore
resembles the research objectives of practice-oriented scholars.
Given the importance of the Wittgensteinian argumentation for prac-
tice theory, it makes sense to briefly elaborate on it. Wittgenstein (2009:
§ 217, 219) emphasised that obeying a rule is a practice that is not
rationally chosen, but is rather done blindly. Human agents do not decide
before they act. They are active and engaged beings who use language as
a fun- damental resource in their interactive relationship with the world.
These practical experiences of actions and reactions constitute the
background and practical knowledge that enables sense making through
everyday activities. For Wittgenstein, “to make sense of why we act, we
have to look around us, not within us. The meaning of an act, just as
much as the meaning of words, is in fact established in the practical
context in which it appears” (Nicolini 2013: 38). Rule following is not a
static procedure, therefore; instead, the decision to follow a rule or not is
highly dependent on unarticulated background knowledge, and is
related to ‘situated accomplishments’ (Lynch 2001: 131).
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 113
 As Mervyn Frost and Silviya Lechner (2016a: 343) argue referring to
Winch’s definition of language-games (Winch 1958: 32), following a rule
is knowing when a mistake has been made whilst stating something or
performing an action. This understanding implies that when one learns
how to participate in a language game, one also learns to follow a rule as
an activity that forces one to make distinctions between successful
perfor- mances and mistakes. Wittgenstein’s understanding of rule-
following and his notion of practice as language-games are highly
relevant for current debates on normativity, and accordingly points to
some major issues in IR research. Firstly, learning the ‘rules of the game’
is a complex social phe- nomenon that always involves an intersubjective
dimension. Secondly, since it is vital to be recognised as a competent
player within a community, the relationship between practices and
normativity is inherently conflic- tual. Lastly, mistakes can happen, and
practices can fail.
These Wittgensteinian insights are, however, subject to considerable
interpretation, and there is significant divergence within practice theory
on how the normativity of practice is conceived. To document this
variety, we explore a range of proposals, all of which share a
methodological start- ing point: they begin analyses with practices, not
norms. Furthermore, theoretical primacy is always reserved for practice,
while norms remain subordinate as a fragile, emerging phenomenon.
Joseph Rouse, a central advocate for a normativity-based practice theory,
first illustrates a way of coping with normativity, which he refers to as
regularism. Normativity is then seen as embedded in regularity.
According to Rouse (2006: 528), in regularism normativity lies “in a
regularity exhibited by what practitioners do, rather than in a rule followed
by them”. Such understandings can be identified in those practice
theories that emphasise regularity, such as Bourdieu’s praxeology.
Rouse finds such an account unconvincing. Drawing on Turner’s
(1994) critique of such an understanding of practice, he points to the
problem that “a finite set of performances exhibits indefinitely many
regu- larities” (Rouse 2006: 529). Various performances can, in principle,
be associated with a practice. There are no obvious criteria by which one
can judge which performances belong to which practices. To decipher
the normativity of a practice, one is then faced with potentially unlimited
interpretations of which performances belong to the practice. To recon-
struct the normativity of a practice by relying on the regularity of practi-
tioners’ performances is therefore inadequate for Rouse (2006: 529).
114 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Rouse (2006) develops an alternative account based on mutual

accountability. The term ‘accountability’, the origins of which lie in eth-
nomethodology (Garfinkel 1967), emphasises that social activities and
practice are orderly and experienced normatively. Following Rouse,
human agents never definitively know whether the use of a term or a
rule in a situation is right or wrong; they must always arrange mutual
account- ability in and through practice. In this alternative conception of
practices and normativity, “a practice is not a regularity underlying its
constituent performances, but a pattern of interaction among them that
expresses their mutual normative accountability” (Rouse 2006: 529).
Normativity lies, then, in the mutual accountability relations of the
constituent actors and elements of a practice. As Rouse (2006: 529–530)
makes clear, “a performance belongs to a practice if it is appropriate to
hold it account- able as a correct or incorrect performance of that
practice. Such holding to account is itself integral to the practice, and can
likewise be done cor- rectly or incorrectly”. Rouse’s conception of
practices as actions consti- tuted by the mutual accountability of their
competent performances points to the temporality of practices and their
normative groundings; practices are themselves contestable.
A similar account has been developed by Alasdair MacIntyre (1984)
from the perspective of moral philosophy. For Nicolini (2013: 84), who
bases his argument on MacIntyre (1984), this leads to an understanding
that performing a practice also implies absorbing “a moral way of being;
that is, a model of excellence specific to that practice that determines at
once an ethic, a set of values, and the sense of virtues associated with the
achievement of the high standard of conduct implicit in the practice”. In
such an account, practices must involve such standards of excellence,
higher normative ends or positive achievements. To participate in com-
mon practice requires accepting the authority of distinct normative stan-
dards as well as criteria of moral judgments by others.
Another approach foregrounding normativity is the pragmatic sociol-
ogy of Boltanski. In this approach, different normative ends become visi-
ble in practices of justification and critique through the mobilisation of
different orders of worth in disputes. Boltanski and Thévenot (2006)
argue that during controversies, actors carry out justifications or critiques
by explicating their moral groundings, related to different moral gram-
mars of legitimate social bonds. Rouse’s philosophical suggestion (2006:
532) that a performance’s accountability to norms is dependent upon its
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 115

ability to inspire an interpretation of it being done for something at stake

in both the interaction and its consequences, is answered by Boltanski
through his framework of economies of worth. In their practices, actors
negotiate using what can be regarded as an acceptable justification or criti-
cism, and test these statements with orders of worth as established
moral evaluation schemes while taking into account the criteria of
whether it serves the common good in their respective society.
Boltanski’s approach can therefore deal with the plurality and
multiplicity of norms and norma- tive orders as overlapping moral
narratives, which is understood as a nor- mal, and not exceptional, part of
our everyday practices.
Practice theories offer an alternative conception of normativity in social
life. They elaborate on different understandings that show how
normativ- ity and activity are mutual constitutive. Following different
interpretations of Wittgenstein, normativity is understood as regularised
performance, mutual accountability relations, moral ways of being, or
negotiated justifications.
If practice theories offer a viable alternative to IR’s constructivist
posi- tions, the virtues of different notions of normativity will continue to
be a matter of debate. So far, this has mainly been a philosophical debate.
As such, the contours of the debate on normativity will depend on how
these conceptualisations can be translated into research methodology and
utilised in actual projects.
A promising recent case in this ongoing debate is the controversy
around Adler-Nissen and Pouliot’s study of the diplomatic conflicts around
the Libya intervention in the U. N. Security Council. While Adler-Nissen
and Pouliot (2014) focused on ‘power in practice’, and principally anal-
ysed the ‘competent performances’ of different political actors without
considering normative positions, Jason Ralph and Jess Gifkins (2017)
criticised this position of competence and power struggles for ignoring
the close linkage between practice theory and normative theory, that is,
uncrit- ically accepting pre-reflexive practices such as ‘penholding’ as
markers of competence. Such controversial empirical cases are useful for
discussing the normative dimension of practices further, and examining
how we can (and should) study it. Moreover, it leads us to the important
question of how we can criticise practices as social science researchers
(Schindler and Wille 2017), which connects practice theory more strongly
to the concerns of normative theory.
116 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Whether it is more promising to separate norms and practices as

norm constructivists do, to conceptualise normativity as the
fundamental com- ponent of practice, or as one element among others,
will remain an issue of debate. Further advancing these arguments in the
light of empirical studies will be of particular assistance in identifying the
commonalities and differences between explanations based on norm
constructivism, interna- tional political theories, and IPT.

5.4 BODIES aND OBJECTS

At the core of practice theory lies a different recognition of the impor-
tance of materiality. Bodies and artefacts are important carriers of practice.
The argument for the primacy of practice is, in the first instance, based in
the claim that practices are bodily activities, involve a range of objects
and artefacts and are, therefore, always materially anchored.
For practice theorists, the body is not a mere instrument that the
agent must use in order to act. Bodies are a constituent element in
perform- ing an action. Routinised actions are themselves bodily
performances (Reckwitz 2002: 251). Such a view not only overcomes the
dichotomy of mind and body, it also gives a pivotal status to the human
body as a core element in explaining and interpreting practices. Practice
theories under- stand human bodies as a locus of agency, affective
response and cultural expression as well as a target of power and
normalisation (Rouse 2006: 512). ‘Skilled bodies’ (Schatzki 2001: 3) are
the locus of practical knowl- edge. The “skilled body commands attention
in practice theory as the common meeting point of mind and activity and
of individual activity and society” (Schatzki 2001: 3).
To carry out a practice as a skilful performance moreover requires
the competent handling of objects, things and artefacts that are neces-
sary elements of any practice. Any human activity is part of a material
configuration. With this focus, practice theories destabilise the
traditional relationship between subjects and objects, and instead
emphasise the active engagement of the latter as constituent within
practices. The prac- tice theory-based notion of agency as an
interweaving force between the human and the non-human world
intends to transcend the dichotomy of subjects and objects.
IR, more broadly, has increasingly expressed an interest in bodies and
artefacts. Work on bodies has particularly been conducted by feminist
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 117

scholars, while artefacts were initially a concern in the discussion of the

role of science and technology in world politics. 6 More recently, bodies
and artefacts are discussed in the discipline under the label of ‘new
mate- rialism’.7 What constitutes ‘new materialism’, other than a shared
appre- ciation for the material dimension of politics, and how it is related
to practice theory remains unclear. From our reading, practices theories,
in particular ANT, can be understood as part of and as contributing to the
rise of such an ‘ism’. However, it is important to note, and as should be
clear by now, that the practice theoretical project has much wider and
distinct concerns. While it emphasises materiality, it does not reduce
research to it, and while it includes materiality in its analysis, it makes it
part of the study of practice, in which it is one element among others.
While most practice theorists agree that the material dimension of practice
matters, the precise status one wants to grant the material remains an
ongoing area of controversy within practice theory.
In IR, ‘the body’ has increasingly become a major issue of study, in
particular in critical security studies and feminism. This research mainly
focuses on bodily representations in discourses and the political effects
arising from them, however. This is the case, for instance, when the
politi- cal use of representations of the violated female body is studied as
a narra- tive to justify military intervention in Afghanistan (Heck and
Schlag 2013), or when gender representations are analysed as myths in
the after- math of the financial crisis (Prü gl 2012). Studies such as these
provide an important link to the concerns of practice theory and the
beginning of a dialogue on the importance of the representational
dimension of the body. In anchoring their arguments in materiality,
practice theorists provide a much-needed amendment to the
representational view. Robert Schmidt (2012: 47), for instance,
elaborates on an example of Bourdieu’s work to mark the difference
that a thoroughly materialist account makes. The example is the olive
harvest in the Kabyle community; Bourdieu analyses how harvesting
practices are performed by members through bodily move- ments,
gestures and routines. Here, men shake olive trees with a stick to
remove the olives from their branches, while women bend over to collect
the olives from the ground. For Schmidt (2012: 47), this division of
labour is permanently reproduced through practices as evidenced by
these per- formed roles in gender relations. Hierarchies, which are seen as
self-evident and natural by the involved members, emerge from working
practices. The hierarchies of gender are here performed through bodily
activities, such as bending over. This is a good example of practice
theoretical accounts that
118 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

often begin with detailed descriptions of bodily practices to recognise

transformations in spheres of working, consumption, family or urban
life. In IPT, Neumann (2012) stresses the importance of such an account
when he describes in detail the everyday practices of diplomats in bureau-
cratic routines or ‘wining and dining’. These routines become habitually
embodied. The growing debate on Judith Butler’s (1993, 1997, 1999)
notion of performativity with regards to issues of international politics
provides a promising way to link the concept of practice with the human
body. By referring to Butler, Caroline Holmqvist (2013) demonstrates
that we specifically need to reconsider our understanding of the human
and materiality in the context of drone warfare. In contrast to the claim
that robotics takes the human experience out of war, she investigates the
human-material assemblage as a complex whole, “taking both fleshy and
steely bodies into account” (Holmqvist 2013: 535). Understanding bodily
movements and how knowledge is inscribed in bodies remains an under-
studied dimension, and further effort will be required here in IPT.
In contrast, objects and artefacts have received more attention. ANT
studies, particularly, have pushed scholars to study the hybrid sphere
between the natural and material world. ANT is also one of the sources
of the controversy on materiality, however, since ANT studies push the
claim of materiality to the extreme. Practice theorists agree that practices
always involve objects, things and artefacts in the practices, and that
these need to be considered in the analysis of practice. To write, you
need a hand, a pen and a paper.
However, they disagree on how objects and materiality engage in
prac- tices, and how the status of agency should be re-conceptualised. In
the practice of writing, are the pen and paper of equal importance to the
hand drawing letters, the brain formulating sentences and the practical
reper- toire of knowing how to write? It may be best to describe this
debate as one between two extremes; at one end of the practice theory
spectrum is the notion of materiality in ANT, where things and artefacts
fully submit to practices in the same way human beings do. Both worlds
gain equal status in the analysis of practices. Humans act, and things do
so do. The term ‘actant’ is the core concept to achieve this symmetry
between the material and the social.
At the other end of the extreme are ‘agential humanists’ (e.g. Schatzki
2002). Here, the argument is in open disagreement with ANT: only
humans can carry out practices, since one can only attribute intentionality
and affectiv- ity to human action (Nicolini 2013: 169). Such humanist
accounts therefore
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 119
tend to distinguish conceptually between practices – carried by humans –
and related material arrangements – composed of the non-human
elements. While arguing that practices and material arrangements are
always enmeshed, the suggestion is nonetheless that humans and non-
humans should be kept separate. Other practice theorists such as
Pickering (1995: 21–22) can be located in the middle of this debate. They
give intentionality only to human beings, yet stress the mutual forces of
human and material agency as ‘the mangle of practice’.
As shown in our overview of key practice approaches, the pragmatic
sociology of Boltanski comes close to Latour’s and Pickering’s notion of
agency. Situations are interpreted as relations between “person-states and
thing-states” often leading to “the monstrosity of composite setups”
(Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 1, 225). Human intentionality does not
appear to be given up in Boltanski’s account due to the premise of critical
and reflexive actors, however. In narrative approaches, which are the
ori- gin of the term ‘actant’ introduced in Greimas’s semiotic linguistics,
human agency also floats ambiguously in a fluid zone between narrator
and narration. It is generally unclear who or what is the main driving
force in narrative practices; that is, is it the storytelling actor or the
wider pro- cess of storytelling? Bourdieu’s praxeology and Wenger’s
communities of practices fall on the opposite side of the divide. For
Bourdieu, practices are materially anchored and habitually embodied,
yet the strong emphasis on dispositions in habitus is clearly rooted in
models of human action and human intentionality. For Wenger, it is
primarily humans that learn and interact in communities of practice.
Foucault’s work is much more diffi- cult to situate in the debate, and
depending on one’s reading, he can be said to occupy a middle ground.
IPT scholars drawing on these approaches have populated and enriched
the world of global politics with all sorts of artefacts. This includes
‘paper’ that leads a ministry of foreign affairs to fundamentally change its
working practices (Dittmer 2016), ‘documents’ that organise European
integra- tion (Walters 2002) to all sorts of ‘weapon technology’,
including ‘war- heads’ (Pouliot 2010a, b), ‘drones’ (Walters 2014) and
security technology such as scanners (Bellanova and Fuster 2013),
computers and databases (Amicelle et al. 2015).
In summary, practice theories develop a different understanding of
materiality and stress the importance of bodily movements and objects.
Practice theories are therefore innovative in the way they challenge con-
ventional dichotomies between understandings of the subject/human
and
120 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

the object/material. The anti-essentialist ideas of ANT, in particular, have

found fertile ground in IPT research. While ANT seems to be one of the
most promising paths for the IPT programme to transfer new
materialism into IR, it should not be understood as a body of theory that
can be simply applied to any empirical example in international politics.
The promises of ANT should not be overstretched; as Stefan Hirschauer
(2004: 74) rightly argues, ANT primarily understands materiality in
terms of technical arte- facts, and thus neglects the body because of its core
differentiation between humans and non-humans. As a result, the body
does not fit very well in the vocabulary of ANT. A conceptualisation of
the body, which deviates away from understanding it as predetermined or
a mere result of practices and moves toward locating it within practices
(Hirschauer 2004: 75), remains a major challenge. This also implies
rejecting the notion of fixed bodies by analysing bodies as ‘multiple’ (Mol
2002) in relation to distinct practices. Therefore, the distinction divergent
understandings of the mate- rial, whether as bodies or as objects, will
make is a theme that will require considerable future attention in IPT.

5.5 POWER aND CRITIQUE

Power has not necessarily been one of IPT’s principle concerns, nor has
it become a focal point of research. However, as Matt Watson (2017:
170) argues, “to fulfil its potential, practice theory needs to be able to
speak of power”. Power can be considered an implicit challenge for IPT,
not least because many of its accounts do not explicate their
understanding of power fully. One of the main reasons for the absence of
explicit discussions on power is that “practice theory does not tend to
focus on power as a separate or distinct property of the social” (Watson
2017: 181). The rela- tional ontology of practice theories implies that
human action is always influenced from somewhere, through relations
that shape that action, or provide the capacity to act. In that sense, any
practice and any relation is always one of power. However, power relations
are always the effect of the performances of practice, and cannot be seen
as standing outside of the broader constellations of practice. Nicolini
(2013: 6) explains this rela- tional logic as follows: “[p]ractices, in fact,
literally put people (and things) in place, and they give (or deny) people
the power to do things and to think of themselves in certain ways. As a
result, practices and their tempo- ral and spatial ordering (i.e. several
practices combined in a particular way) produce and reproduce
differences and inequalities”. Power is an effect of practice, and is
produced within it.
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 121
 Practice approaches agree on the high relevance of relational power
dynamics. Yet, the concept of power plays different roles in the spectrum
of IPT, and directs scholarship into different directions. This raises the
question whether and how approaches allow for other forms of power that
do not directly or immediately follow from the relational logic outlined
above. This includes forms of power inscribed in institutions, such as the
state, or large-scale phenomena such as race, class or markets.
The practice theories of Bourdieu and Foucault are generally recog-
nised as providing effective tools for the analysis of such forms of power
through a focus on symbolic struggles, practices of domination, or tech-
nologies of government. They are interested in such forms of power
because they emphasise the orderliness of practices; power is what stabi-
lises orders. Approaches that argue on the basis of flat ontologies (such
as the vocabularies of Boltanski, Schatzki or Latour) struggle with
analysing these forms of power, given that their focus on change and
contingency makes it more difficult to explain long term stability.
It is fair to say that power is not the major concern of these scholars,
though it does play an underlying role. In ANT, power is always one
dimension of relations, and the focus is on sites or technologies that
have high ordering capacity. Pragmatic sociology aims at revealing
inequalities in the interplay of justification and critique (Boltanski 2011:
37). Schatzki (2002: 66) sympathises with a Foucauldian notion of
power. He emphasizes the multiplicity of force relations that hold among
social particulars, and operate and constitute their own organisation.
However, power needs to be addressed through analysing hierarchies
and tying authority and disputation to teleoaffective normativity (Schatzki
2002: 267). Narrative approaches, in particular, put strong emphasis on
the underlying conditions behind ‘successful’ storytelling, with all its
implications for political authority and the legitimation of power claims.
Shared stories can unite and divide, especially in politics, which is always
a question of power. In community of practice research power relations
are inherent in a community and the distribution of skills and expertise
it entails, but also practices of in- and exclusion, which point to con-
flicts of belonging and entail power relations between different groups
and actors.
A second question concerns the role of power analysis in directing
scholarly action. For some scholars, an analysis of power is important
because it is the basis of critique. Such a position follows the tradition of
critical theory and aims at revealing the reproducing mechanisms of power
relations and their effects in objective structures. Such a view implies
that
122 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

the researcher should seek external positions to the field from which he
can study power relations and formulate a critique of current social and
political dynamics. In contrast to this focus on unravelling hidden power
relations, other scholars are more driven by the pragmatist’s gaze of recon-
structing relations and developing creative problem solutions. From this
viewpoint, power does not have to be encountered by critique, but is a
tool to be used to build better relations and enable better solutions.
While Bourdieusian and Foucauldian approaches are often associated
with the former position, this does not follow naturally from the
concepts. For Pouliot (2016), for instance, Bourdieu’s work provides
primarily an ana- lytical toolbox, rather than the basis for critique. Also
Foucault’s work has been read in different ways, and for instance,
Vanderveen (2010), empha- sizes that Foucault’s intention was less
critique but the reconstruction of problematic situations. Latour (2004),
by contrast, is an outspoken advo- cate against critique as the objective
of scholarship.
As this brief review already demonstrates, power is a major category in
IPT, albeit it is often silenced. How power relations can be analysed on
the larger scale, and whether the analysis of power should be a main
driver of research, is disputed among IPT scholars, however.
IR was long dominated by reductionist understandings of power that
narrowed it down to material capabilities. This has changed since
Michael Barnett and Robert Duvall (2005) fundamentally re-ordered the
debate by providing a taxonomy of power, and demonstrating that too
much attention had been paid to Robert Dahl’s notion of ‘power
over’. This form of power, described as “compulsory power”, needed to
be comple- mented. Barnett and Duvall suggested broadening the
spectrum by proposing three other forms of power: institutional,
structural, and pro- ductive power. Institutional power is the control
actors exercise indirectly over others through diffuse relations of
interaction; structural power can be identified in structural relationships
such as capital and labour; and productive power is concerned with the
production of subjectivities (Barnett and Duvall 2005: 43). The intention
of Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy was not to provide a coherent theory
of power, but to encour- age scholars to recognise power’s multiple
forms and its polymorphous character. The different forms of power
should not be seen as necessarily competing, but rather as different
expressions of how power may work in international politics (Barnett
and Duvall 2005: 44).
This objective, to focus on the connections and overlaps between dif-
ferent types of power, closely reflects the concerns of practice-oriented
scholars. As Sending and Neumann (2011: 235) exemplarily argue, a turn
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE TH
 EORY
123

to practices allows us to explore how different forms of power can be at

work simultaneously. In their case, they focus on the role and power of
expertise in international organisations such as the World Bank. They
study how the bank’s expertise is embedded in a set of fundamental
prac- tices that structures its relations with states and stabilises its
authority. Key among these practices is the bank’s annual assessment
procedure, by which the ‘performance’ of client countries is evaluated
according to a set of criteria. Sending and Neumann (2011: 232) argue
that the procedure is an anchoring practice – a bundle of interwoven
practices making possible other, more specific ones such as the bank’s
allocation system that struc- tures negotiations between management
and member states over alloca- tion of funds and overall political
direction. The assessment procedure is a direct form of compulsory
power that comes through allocation of funds, but it also produces
indirect forms of productive power. The ratings pro- duced allow
country teams to engage with client countries from a position of
authority. This authority is not only grounded in the general expert
status of the bank, but produced through the specific ratings and scores
produced in the assessment exercise (Sending and Neumann 2011: 235–
236). This example shows how practice-oriented research can allow for
exploring different types of power in their overlapping workings. It is
also an example that documents how practice scholars can scale up and
investigate how one practice is more important than another, in other
words, the relations of power between practices.
A strength of IPT studies is that they embed an analysis of power in
concrete empirical cases, and therefore illustrate how diffuse power
relations can be observed in current phenomena of international politics.
The following examples underline these claims and show how the differ-
ent notions of power are linked with various understandings of critique.
Bourdieusian IPT is centred on the analysis of power. Guzzini (2013),
one of the leading theorists on power in IR (e.g. 1993), praises
Bourdieu’s vocabulary as one of the rare examples that considers
different facets of power between the micro- and the macro-level such as
government (order), autonomy (freedom), domination (rule), and
influence (cause) within a coherent social theory of power and
domination. His relational field theory includes other elements, namely
power as relational capital, symbolic violence and the role of language in
domination, social stratifica- tion and the field of power and its relation
to the state. For Guzzini, Bourdieu’s concepts hence provide a solid
bridge between sociological theorising and political theory (Guzzini
2013: 80–85).
124 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Turning to Bourdieusian IPT scholars, it seems that many of them are

interested in a sociological analysis of power (e.g. Berling 2012; Adler-
Nissen 2014) and less in categories of political theory. Adler-Nissen and
Pouliot’s (2014) analysis of the negotiations around the international
intervention in Libya at the U. N. Security Council is an exemplary case of
prioritisation of a sociological analysis of power. They reveal the inner
workings of power in the Council between member states by showing
how the struggle for competence in everyday performances lead to
differ- ent claims of authority and distinct hierarchies in the field.
However, they shy away from interpreting the political effects of these
power struggles and downplay the normativity of practices and their
contested nature. This ‘neutral’ stance of describing power games has
been widely criticised (e.g. Gadinger 2016: 194; Ralph and Gifkins 2017),
leading to a distancing from the spirit of the critical tradition.
In contrast to Bourdieu-inspired studies, IR scholars working on gov-
ernance as governmentality in the tradition of Foucault (e.g. Lö wenheim
2008; Sending and Neumann 2006) put more emphasis on the concerns
of political theory. In these accounts, the analysis of power is considered in
terms of a wider social control, and works through subjecting individuals
to it and assessing force as a function of their conduct. Sending and
Neumann’s example of the practices of expertise in the World Bank dem-
onstrates how standards of ‘good governance’ interact with those who
are subject to it. The study of governmentality thus shows “how expert
knowledge on governance is part and parcel of global governance”
(Guzzini 2012: 24). As Guzzini (2012: 24) argues, such standards are also
‘identifiers’ since they distinguish between those who are part of the
truly civilized world and those who are not, which implies that being at
the forefront of implemented indirect liberal rule has become a marker
for gaining status as civilized and acceptable to community. The
productive power reveals how such technologies and practices of
government ‘respon- sibilise’ the subjected nations for their own fate and
eventually push even those who did not initially want to abide by those
standards to comply, which only reinforces the existing mechanism
(Guzzini 2012: 24).
The Foucauldian approach investigates impersonal processes, tech-
niques and mechanisms of government such as statistical devices, bench-
marks and indices, and is based on a dispersion of power (Guzzini 2012:
24). For Foucault-inspired scholars such as Sending and Neumann
(2006), the increasing relevance of NGOs in global civil society is not an
example of transfer of power from state to nonstate actors, but rather an
expression
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 125
of a changing logic or rationality of government by which civil society is
redefined from being a passive object of government to be acted upon
into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government. The
study of such practices of governmentality therefore clearly follows a
critical per- spective of the effects of power for the “neoliberal subject”
(Chandler and Reid 2016). It reveals the dynamic facets of the changing
logic of govern- ment in policy fields such as development, security, and
peacebuilding that stabilises the power relations of the liberal order
(Neumann and Sending 2010). The critical research agenda is open and
considers other types of power, for instance, practices of resilience as
flexible forms of governmen- tality (e.g. Joseph 2016).
What Foucauldian scholarship showcases in particular is the importance
of a critical gaze. For these scholars, the analysis of power is an exercise
of critique. They rely on a position that argues in favour of studying and
criti- cising practices of domination from the standpoint of the
‘professional ana- lyst’ who gains privileged knowledge over what is
really happening, in contrast to the actors studied. Such critical scholars
are sceptical of the pragmatist orientation one finds in Latour and Boltanski
that favours a sym- metrical position, and reject the split between
‘ordinary actors’ and the ‘professional analyst’. Sending (2015) finds their
perspective problematic, “since it makes it all the more likely that
academics simply end up reproduc- ing conventional understandings and
participants’ self-description”. For critical scholars, a symmetrical position
risks losing the researcher’s scien- tific autonomy.
For Boltanski and Latour the methodological objective of ‘following
the actors’ is not simply about regurgitating ordinary actors’ understand-
ings and self-description on situated grounds, however. Instead, the strong
emphasis on the interpretive work of observing actors en situation renews
the possibilities of critical sociology by taking the critical capacities of ordi-
nary actors seriously. Put simply, Boltanski’s sociology aims to expand
critical theory by “making actors part of it” (Bogusz 2014: 130). Such a
perspective aims to become an active ‘sociology of emancipation’ by
treat- ing ‘ordinary actors’ not as passive judgmental dopes, but rather as
“frankly critical” (Boltanski 2011: 26).
The underlying objective in pragmatic sociology is that in examining
how ordinary actors make moral judgements and interpret reality, the
discrepancies between their “moral expectations” and the actual social
world will be exposed. That is, pragmatic sociology establishes an
unprec- edented ‘compromise’ between social theory and social critique
practiced by non-academics (Nachi 2014: 308). The pragmatic way of
criticising
126 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

practices is therefore rooted in a division of labour between the researcher,

who describes and reconstructs the disputes and controversies, and the
actors studied, who are sometimes silent in cycles of domination (such as
the decline of critique in the new spirit of capitalism, as shown by Boltanski
and Chiapello 2007), but often break the power of institutions through
critique and the imperative of justification.
A major difference between Bourdieu’s praxeology and pragmatic
soci- ology lies, as Médéric Martin-Mazé (2017) argues, in the agonistic
facet of practices and the different notions of conflicts as struggles or
disputes. Whereas disputes break out every day in countless concrete
situations of high uncertainty, actors settle disputes once they have
reached a fragile agreement over how to properly test their respective
worth. But actors are realists in picking their battles, as they limit
themselves to the situations that they know instead of calling into
question the larger social contexts in which they are embedded (Martin-
Mazé 2017: 216). Struggles, on the contrary, are specific to distinct fields,
in which actors tacitly agree on the value of resources in forms of capital
that they strive to accumulate, and whose scarcity defines stronger and
weaker positions. “Struggles are there- fore driven by a complex
combination and of dispositional and positional logics. They do not end,
but reboot on the rare occasions when challeng- ers manage to topple
incumbents” (Martin-Mazé 2017: 216).
This terminological distinction is useful, as it explains the different
notions of power in relation to order and change. The never-ending
strug- gles of critical scholars have a higher degree of orderliness and
control in more (Bourdieu) or less (Foucault) visible power relations.
Disputes (Boltanski) and controversies (Latour) also entail power
relations, but they are characterised as situations that provide more
opportunities for agency and change and an escape from the reproducing
mechanisms of hierarchies and technologies of government.
In ANT studies, the notion of power is even more fluid, as it is never
predictable whether relations and translations in an emerging, heteroge-
neous network of human and non-human actors hold together and develop
performative effects. To act collectively and to exercise power, “we depend
upon the agency of human and non-human others, an agency which is
often truculent, recalcitrant, crafty, and self-interested” (Best and Walters
2013: 333). In short, translational power in ANT studies is a relational
concept examining the abilities of actors to create durable relations between
previously unconnected entities and represent this very assemblage (Berger
and Esguerra 2017: 219). This notion of power prompts the researcher
to
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 127
investigate how actors achieve consolidated yet never-fully-stable relations
between different entities, as well as how they make these relations present
(Berger and Esguerra 2017: 221).
The analytical potential of other IPT approaches, such as the narrative
and community of practice approaches, to analyse power relations requires
further elaboration, and indeed they can be developed in different direc-
tions. Narrative approaches consider the relation of power and language in
quite similar terms to discourse theory. A clash of narratives in political
crises, for instance, the Crimean crisis (Faizullaev and Cornut 2017),
shows the interconnectedness of both practices and storytelling when
fuelled by power claims. The question of how narratives are configured
and which knowledge resources are selected in the employment of a
story has an impact on authority and power claims. The community of
practice approach is often taken to either be indifferent towards power,
consider- ing the harmonious assumptions of the community metaphor,
or only concerned about power relations within a community, and not
the power relations that communities are subjected to.
Recent scholarship has started to address these issues, however. For
instance, as Maren Hofius (2016) demonstrates, a focus on the
boundaries of communities can be particularly revealing. In her case
study, EU field diplomats engage in constant boundary work that
establishes insiders and outsiders in relation to the neighbouring state of
Ukraine. In this case, power in practice means that the EU diplomats
function as ‘boundary workers’ as they are engaged in both boundary-
spanning and boundary- drawing practices on an day-to-day basis, which
reveals a more complex understanding of community and identity as an
emergent structure of possibilities, and experienced as borderland.
As we see in these examples, IPT studies contribute to the ongoing
debate on the relation between different forms of power in international
politics. If practice-oriented studies refrain from narrowing power down to
a singular form, practice approaches will be able to demonstrate how dif-
ferent forms of power work simultaneously and merge in practice. This will
include addressing power relations on larger scales, such as institutions.
Practices provide a useful methodological entry point for the analysis of
power. IPT scholars take different positions over why we should be
inter- ested in power, however. If, for Foucauldian and Bourdieusian
scholarship in particular, the goal is to develop forms of societal critique
on the basis of an analysis of power, other versions of IPT do not
necessarily share this concern; following the pragmatist gaze, the focus
turns to reconstruction.
128 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

How these positions can be reconciled will remain an ongoing matter of

debate, as will learning more about the empirical workings of power in
practice.

5.6 PRODUCTIVE TENSIONS

One of the means of judging the productivity of a research perspective
goes beyond questioning what new insights it provides, to asking what
new puzzles it poses. As we have shown in this chapter, IPT provides a
rich set of questions for further inquiry, as different approaches provide
diver- gent takes on a number of the core ontological questions at the
heart of practice theory. There are significant tensions between these
approaches.
Awareness of these tensions is, firstly, important in terms of the kind
of ontological baggage and conceptual problems one takes on board if
one neatly follows one approach. If understood as a trading zone,
drawing on IPT does not necessarily imply a pick-and-choose approach.
None of the IPT approaches provide the right or wrong answer to the
ontological questions we have addressed. Part of the value of future IPT
research will stem from appreciating the tensions between approaches,
and turning the ontological questions into explicit research questions.
Asking when and how change occurs, how the micro is embedded in the
macro and scales are made, how different understandings of normativity
lead to different results on the prevalence of norms and the regularity of
practice, or how bodies and objects play a role, are questions that will drive
the IPT research agenda into innovative and productive directions.
Not every research project will be able to address all of these
questions. Nevertheless, issues of change, scale, normativity, materiality,
power and critique are major debates providing theoretical direction to
empirical research. Much of these debates have so far been carried out in
a philo- sophical language and often in an overly abstract manner and do
not give justice to the demands of understanding practice. As we have often
alluded to, much will therefore depend on how these conceptual and
ontological challenges are translated into actual research projects.
Addressing the debates requires methodological and empirical work.
Tinkering with methodology is, therefore, the pivotal step, and the issue
we turn to next.
CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL PRACTICE
THEORY 129

NOTES
1. This includes the more detailed debates on visuality and the practice of seeing
(e.g. Lisle 2017), cognition and the role of the brain in practice (e.g. Turner
 2007; Lizardo 2009), knowledge and learning (e.g. Turner 2001;
Alkemeyer and Buschmann 2017), or affectivity and feeling (e.g. Reckwitz
2012; Bially Mattern 2011).
2. In addition to those discussed below, metaphors recently introduced include
the concept of ‘textures of practice’ proposed by Silvia Gherardi (2012) ,
‘practice architectures’ proposed by Stephen Kemmis (see Mahon et al.
2017), the concept of ‘complexes of practice’ developed by Elizabeth Shove
(Shove et al. 2012), Karin Knorr Cetina’s concept of ‘global microstruc-
tures’ (Knorr Cetina 2005; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002), as well as
various recent understandings of discourse and discursive formations (see
Schatzki 2017).
3. For an outline of these respective positions, see Gilpin 1981, and the
contri- butions in Ikenberry 2014 for the realist position, for the
constructivist dis- cussion see Widmaier et al. (2007), the contributions in
Avant et al. (2010), and the reviews in Flockhart (2016) and Hopf (2017).
4. Hopf distinguishes between meaningful difference or novelty, repeated
exposures to I, exposures to social margins and liminars, weakly socialised
and institutionalised environments, institutionalised differences and novel-
ties, discursively resonant challenges to the status quo, intelligible and
plau- sible alternatives to the status quo, and productive crises.
5. For the relation between multi-sited ethnography and practice theory, see
Schmidt and Volbers (2011) and our discussion of the methodological rela-
tion between IPT and ethnography in Chap. 6.
6. See the reviews in Mayer et al. (2014) and McCarthy (2017).
7. See Srnicek (2017) as well as the special issue on ‘Materialism and World
Politics’ of Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(3).
 CHAPTER 6

Doing Praxiography: Research Strategies,

Methods and Techniques

IPT is often understood to primarily seek to clarify concepts, re-orientate

theory and argue for a focus on practices. What tends to be forgotten is
that the majority of approaches and studies “emerged in close and con-
stant touch with empirical studies and developed from reflecting experi-
ences in empirical research” (Schmidt 2017: 3). The approaches
discussed in chapters three and four all derive their concepts and ideas
from empiri- cal studies. Diligent and intensive empirical work is crucial
for IPT; indeed, as we suggested in Chap. 2, the primacy of the empirical
is one of the shared core commitments of practice accounts. As Schmidt
(2017: 3) pro- claims, “the practice turn also amounts to an empirical
turn in sociology and social sciences”.
If we agree with Schmidt’s diagnosis, in the study of the international,
practice turn discussions have often failed to pay sufficient attention to
the empirical side of the study of practices. Many studies in IPT include
and discuss empirical material; often, however, it is unclear how this
empirical material has been gathered, assembled and interpreted. There is
therefore little guidance on how to actually undertake and write up
practice-theory-driven research. A growing number of reflections on the
methodological implications of practice theory have been published
recently, in particular in other social science disciplines. 1 However, over-
all, the debates on methodology, research strategies, methods and tech-
niques required to study practices remain limited. What are the most
promising paths to practice? How should we best generate empirical
data

© The Author(s) 2018 131

C. Bueger, F. Gadinger, International Practice
Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-
73350-0_6
132 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

about practices? What research strategies follow if one takes practice as

the smallest unit of analysis? Which techniques allow for deciphering of
practices, and how do they do so?
In this chapter, we set out to address these questions. Our goal is to
provide orientation for those interested in undertaking a practice-
theory- informed analysis, but also to provide reflections for those who are
already studying practices empirically. Our goal is not to prescribe how
to do a practice-driven research project. Instead, we offer an exploration
of a range of parameters, tools and techniques that provide inspiration
for designing and practicing research.
We advance the notion of praxiography as the set of methods and
tech- niques corresponding to practice theory needs. The term
praxiography implies that the study of practices has much in common
with ethnography (but also other more established procedures, such as
those of ethnometh- odology and interpretative social science). The
common concern is to record, to describe and to reconstruct (−graphy);
however, the interest lies not in culture (ethno), but with practice (praxis).
If ethnography is usually concerned with people’s way of life,
praxiography is interested in under- standing practices and their
configurations.
The chapter starts out with a range of epistemological and method-
ological considerations. This is to provide a reminder about the
specificity of studying practice, but also to elaborate more on the
connections between praxiography and other forms of interpretative
analysis. We dis- cuss the importance of recognising that ‘doing
praxiography’ should also be understood as a practice, explore the status
of ‘theory’ and generalisa- tions in praxiography, and emphasise the
significance of recursive and abductive reasoning. What follows is that
“practice theory is not a theo- retical project (in the traditional sense),
but a methodological orientation supported by a new vocabulary”
(Nicolini 2017b: 25).
If this section aims at providing a general sense of orientation and of
the modalities of praxiography, the next one addresses research strategy.
We take the question of research strategies to be primarily a problem of
where to begin empirical research. There are several different plausible
starting points for a praxiography, and to some degree they directly
follow from an approach’s emphasis on certain elements of practice. For
instance, field analysis encourages us to study fields, while narrative
analysis sets out from the reconstruction of storytelling.
We conclude this section with an outline of five productive starting
points for praxiography, while the following section addresses the question
DOING PRAXIOGRAPHY: RESEARCH STRATEGIES, METHODS…
133
of methods and technique. Praxiographers can draw on considerable expe-
rience of methods gained through decades of anthropological and social
science research. However, many of these methods must be tailored to
the particular needs of practice theory. In this section we discuss, firstly,
differ- ing techniques of participant observation, field work and action
research, and secondly, conversation techniques such as interviews and
focus groups, as well as, finally, document and artefact analysis. We
provide a short sketch of each of these techniques and how they can be
employed in prax- iography, and introduce some paradigmatic examples.
Together, these techniques provide a rich repertoire for praxiography
that can be blended in various ways, depending on the demands and
methodicity of the phe- nomenon studied.
Our final section is concerned with the reporting of research. How
does one write about practice? This question has received relatively sparse
attention, and is difficult to answer. Writing about practice implies
taming the unruliness of practices, and ordering them into a more-or-
less coher- ent narrative. We argue that we should firstly think about
writing as a practice that is not exterior to producing knowledge, but a
fundamental part of it. In practical terms, we consider writing about
practices to be primarily about the problem of intelligibility. How can a
narrative about practice be written in a way that makes sense to a
distinct audience? We argue that praxiography requires experimentation
and creativity, and introduce ideas from ethnography and filmmaking as
inspirations.

6.1 TOWaRDS PRaXIOGRaPHY: METHODOLOGY

aND GENERaL GUIDELINES

Theorising is a practice; undertaking research is a practice. Everything that

has been said about practice in general also applies for the practice of theo-
rising about practice, as well as undertaking research driven by practice
theory. As sociologists of science have noted, this implies that we may
use practice theory to make sense of researchers’ practice as well as our
own. Indeed, the study of epistemic practices has been a vital object of
research in driving practice theory. 2 Undertaking praxiography is then,
first and foremost, as Greiffenhagen et al. (2015: 461) phrase it, not to
follow “programmatic doctrinal statements of the aims of the social sciences
wed- ded to meta-reflection, critique and inter- and intra-disciplinary
jostling and one-upmanship. Rather than using idealised conceptions of
social sci- ence as decontextualised standards to judge what social
scientists do, the
134 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

focus has [to be] on understanding the scale, range and diversity of the
social sciences practical entanglements in social and cultural life”.
Consequently, there is no universal standard for how to undertake prac-
tice research. As Pouliot (2013: 46) points out with reference to
Bourdieu, “the craft of research is, first and foremost, a practice, which
rests on vari- ous skills developed through actual training and
experience. Stylised exposes and abstract standards […] are
methodologically useless if not problematic.”
Nevertheless, we can draw on the existing repertoire of
methodological discourse and practice that provides basic guidance,
rules of thumb, tips, tricks and help to avoid basic mistakes. Methodology
does not and cannot provide answers to all questions and practical
decisions that a researcher will face in the process of carrying out a
project, however.
Barbara Czarniawska (2007: 5) starts her book on methodology with
the following quote:

Intense methodological awareness, if engaged in too seriously, can create

anxieties that hinder practice, but if taken in small doses it can help to
guard against the most obvious errors. (Seale 1999: ix)

As she alludes to in this passage, methodological uncertainties or

“trou- bles” (Greiffenhagen et al. 2015) are a constitutive part of the
research process. It is, moreover, important not to push methodological
reflexivity too far. Methodological explication should not hinder actual
research or halt one’s curiosity about a practice. The majority of
discussions on meth- odology and techniques only become meaningful in
the conduct of actual research, and when encountering practical
problems.
Theories, approaches, concepts, and techniques make sense when
they are actually used in a research project, that is, they are enacted in
observ- ing, interpreting or writing up. Methodology negotiates between
theory and empirical phenomena. For many practice scholars,
methodology is therefore crucial, both to address the conceptual
challenges discussed in the prior chapter, for reformulating theoretical
approaches, and, perhaps most importantly, to write enlightening and
critical narratives of empirical phenomena.3
What, then, is the status of ‘theory’ in practice theoretical research?
What theory is and what it is not remains quite contentious. The contro-
versy over the ‘end’ of international relations theory is a quite telling
indi- cator in this regard. Scholars disagree over what theory is, what it is
for, and how to gauge the quality of a theory.4
DOING PRAXIOGRAPHY: RESEARCH STRATEGIES, METHODS…
135
 By ‘theory’, we often understand an abstract system of generalisations
that is universally valid, independent from time and space. The notion of
theory that IPT embraces is quite distinct from such an understanding,
however. If practices are ever-moving, shifting and changing entities
situ- ated in space and time, how could we consider to formulate a
universally valid theory of practice? How can we judge the quality of
theory in the absence of an actual practice?
As Schmidt (2017: 5) notes, in practice theory, “the separation of
theory and empirical research is deliberately destabilised. Both realms are
method- ologically re-assessed in their mutual entanglement”. While for
some the implication is to revoke the notion of ‘theory’ altogether, 5 for
the majority of practice theorists, it is a call for novel understandings of
theory.
When practice theorists use the notion of theory, they often refer to it
as a collection of ‘sensitising concepts’. This notion was coined by the
social theorist Herbert Blumer (1954), who contrasted sensitising con-
cepts with “definite concepts” that have defined attributes and clearly
point to an empirical object. A sensitising concept, by contrast,

gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching

empirical instances. Whereas definitive concepts provide prescriptions of
what to see, sensitising concepts merely suggest directions along which to
look. […] They lack precise reference and have no benchmarks which allow
a clean-cut identification of a specific instance and of its content. Instead,
they rest on a general sense of what is relevant. (Blumer 1954: 7)

The IPT approaches we have discussed provide sensitising concepts in

this sense. Concepts such as field, community, laboratory, situations and
so on, have no direct empirical reference. They provide us guidance and tell
us what is relevant. IPT is therefore best understood as “a heuristic
device, a sensitising ‘framework’ for empirical research in the social
sciences. It thus opens up a certain way of seeing and analysing social
phenomena” (Reckwitz 2002: 257). As Annemarie Mol suggests, we
should take the notion of “sensitising” quite literally, implying the use of
all our senses. For her,

a “theory” is something that helps scholars to attune to the world, to see

and hear and feel and taste it. Indeed, to appreciate it. […] A theory is a
reposi- tory of terms and modes of engaging with the world, a set of
contrary meth- odological reflexes. These help in getting a sense of what is
going on, what deserves concern or care, anger or love, or simply attention.
[…] A theory helps to tell cases, draw contrasts, articulate silent layers,
turn questions upside down, focus on the unexpected, add to one’s
sensitivities, propose new terms, and shift stories from one context to
another. (Mol 2010b: 262)
136 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

As Reckwitz and Mol emphasise, practice theorists follow the insight

of classical pragmatism, that theory should be understood in
functionalist terms, as a toolbox of concepts and sensitivities that allow
us to describe, interpret and cope with the world differently. This point is
also emphasised by Nicolini (2017b: 24) when he argues that

the aim of theory is not to provide general laws or explain casual or associative
relationships between constructs; rather, it aims to provide a set of discursive
resources to produce accounts, overviews and analyses of social affairs that
enrich our understanding of them: a social ontology. Put differently,
practice theory provides a set of concepts (a theoretical vocabulary) and a
conceptual grammar (how to link these concepts in a meaningful way) that
allow us to generate descriptions and ‘bring worlds into being’ in the texts
we compose.

If research is a practice, and practice theory a sensitising framework,

it is also important to keep in mind that all the main IPT approaches we
have introduced do not provide fixed systems of reference, but are open
ended and starting points for asking questions. Whether one relies on
Bourdieu’s, Wenger’s or other versions of practice theory, the concrete
research proj- ect one engages in requires one to adjust, to change and to
add to the framework. Practice-theory-driven research does not fill a
pre-existing ‘gap’ in an established body of knowledge (Sandberg and
Alveson 2011). It problematises phenomena, adds new perspectives and
interpretations, demonstrates how things play out in different contexts,
and it enriches. Theorising and researching empirical phenomena are
therefore not oppo- site poles, but part of one recursive thought process.
As argued by Schmidt (2017: 5), “theory should be constructed in such a
manner that theoreti- cal concepts are continuously irritated and revised
by empirical observa- tions. Such a version of theory seeks to ensure that
theoretical assumptions […] are not excluded from being empirically
questioned, altered and reconstructed”. As Nicolini (2017b: 25) suggests,
“practice theory cannot be written first and operationalised later; it can
only emerge through engagement with the phenomenon. […] While
debating what practice is can be a useful exercise to refine our vocabulary
and sharpen our analytical categories, this is only a means to an end. At
some point, one has to engage with practice itself and allow the
phenomenon to bite back”.
As expressed in these arguments, the overall research logic of praxiog-
raphy is recursive and abductive (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012: 26–34;
Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009; Thomas 2010). Conducting research
implies a constant movement (Bueger and Mireanu 2014); one moves
DOING PRAXIOGRAPHY: RESEARCH STRATEGIES, METHODS…
137
back and forth between theory, methodology and empirical material. In
these movements, chains of reference between concepts and the world
are built, which culminate in the practice of writing up results and
publishing them. These movements imply a constant negotiation of
proximity to practice (Bueger and Mireanu 2014). In many ways,
practice-driven research involves what Kurowska and Tallis (2013) call
“chiasmatic cross- ings”, that is, the co-production of knowledge by
collaborations of ana- lysts and the practitioners studied (Down and
Hughes 2009). Practitioners and analysts search and find, interpret and
reconstruct practices and knowledge, or develop concepts together
through conversations.
If practice is a situated phenomenon and theoretical arguments are
always tied to a distinct set of practices, does such an understanding
imply that researchers should give up on the idea that research can
generalise? Generalising and universalising are not quite the same. If
praxiographers emphasise the impossibility of the latter – as “there is no
universal” (Law 2004: 156) – this does not imply that praxiographic
narratives are tied to the local and narrow situational description.
Praxiographies ‘zoom out’ and make ‘partial connections’ between sites,
practices and configurations. They never provide a full explanation or
description, but only limited ones. They offer context-specific and situated
generalisations in, for instance, exhibiting how practices achieve
overarching regularity across time and space.
Halkier, for instance, suggests three concrete strategies for how one
can generalise on the basis of praxiographic data. She argues in favour of
build- ing Weberian ideal typologies, that is, synthesising “diffuse and
discrete empirical phenomena into a unified abstract analytical construct”
(Halkier 2011: 790), for ‘category zooming’ that focusses on one aspect
of a set of data in order to allow for case comparisons (Halkier 2011:
792), and for ‘positioning’ to allow generalisation by linking a distinct
knowledge claim to a position within the field (Halkier 2011: 794). Her
proposals are examples of how practice-focused research can overcome
the dualism of theory and empirics, while refraining from the idea that
only universalism can advance arguments of relevance broader than the
immediate context of study.6
If the notion of practice theory, and IPT in particular, are relatively recent
labels, this does not imply that the methodological wheel needs to be re-
invented when conducting practice-theory-driven research. Rather, many of
the considerations, guidelines and experiences of ethnographic, interpre-
tive and qualitative research are also relevant for practice theory research.
With that in mind, the vast body of methodology works on interpretive,
qualitative or ethnographic approaches are also useful for practice theory.
138 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

As we discuss further in the following sections, some adjustments to the

specific concerns of practice theory are required. As already suggested,
to mark the way that practice-theory-driven research combines old and new
insights, we find the term ‘praxiography’ useful in speaking about the
type of research that practice theory produces (Bueger 2014).7
The term was originally coined by Annemarie Mol (2002) to describe
a style of ethnographic research primarily concerned with objectual
practices. It is helpful in that it clarifies that the reconstruction of prac-
tice shares many concerns with ethnography, in particular the idea of
thick description. The common concern is to record, describe and to
reconstruct (-graphy), but the interest is not in culture (ethno), but with
practice (praxis).
If ethnography is normally focussed on the way of life of a people,
prax- iography is concerned with understanding of a practice, a
phenomenon situated in time and space. Drawing such a link to
ethnography clarifies the overall methodological direction that practice-
theory-driven research takes: much of what has been written on
(reflexive) ethnography is also valid for practice research, and there is a
wide spectrum of method mixes available for the study of practice. To
speak about praxiography is to avoid narrowing down the methodological
discussion to that of traditional eth- nography and its field work
practices.8 It is also to open the discussion up to techniques that have not
(yet) influenced the ethnographic discourse, or are generally considered
to be separate projects. This includes interpre- tive traditions such as
action research, ethnomethodology, discourse anal- ysis, visual analysis
or social media analysis, which can offer important techniques for
praxiography. Much as contemporary ethnography is not limited to a
single method, the same can be said about praxiography; mix- ing and
assembling methods as appropriate to the practice one studies is the
general guideline.
In this section, we have outlined a set of general guidelines and
orienta- tions: research is a practice and as such erratic and open ended;
theory is not fixed, but provides an apparatus of sensitising concepts that
become meaningful in use; practice theory research does not seek to fill
gaps but to problematise, to add and to enrich; praxiography draws on
the princi- ples of recursivity, abduction, mobility, proximity and co-
production.
To flesh out the methodological bone, let us discuss how praxiogra-
phers have attempted to study practice. The first question to be
addressed is where to start; from which points does one initiate
research? This is, in essence, a question of research strategy.
DOING PRAXIOGRAPHY: RESEARCH STRATEGIES, METHODS…
6.2 KNOWING
 WHERE TO STaRT: BaSIC 139
RESEaRCH STRaTEGIES
A praxiography starts out from a phenomenon, which might be, but is in
no way limited to, a traditional one, such as gender, class, economy or
security. The initial starting point is to turn this phenomenon into an
object of praxiography. Gender becomes a problem of doing gender, class
of classification practices, economy of economisation practices, security of
securitisation practices, and so on. The next step is to generate praxio-
graphic questions with the help of the conceptual vocabulary and gram-
mar of practice theory. One initiates the process of abduction by identifying
sensitising concepts.
Basic research strategies therefore develop more-or-less directly from
the theoretical approaches hitherto discussed, and the sensitising concepts
they provide. If one then relies, for instance, on a Bourdieusian or
Wengerian framework, the initial objective becomes one of
reconstructing the practices of a distinct social figuration, that is, either a
field of practice or a community of practice. From a Foucaultian
framework, the goal becomes to study the problematisation practices
that produce and govern an epistemic object. The narrative approach
suggests identifying narra- tives, reconstructing storytelling in situations
and studying the effects of the narrative across situations. Drawing on
ANT opens up a more contin- gent spectrum of possibilities, but the
majority of studies have been fol- lowing actants and their activities of
weaving and organising a net that produces objects, facts or powerful
actors. The pragmatic sociology of Boltanski invites us to zoom in on
controversies and their settlement to unravel patterns of justifications
across situations and the emergence of new practical orders. These
starting points differ considerably, and are direct consequences of the
respective sensitising framework.
The methodological consequences of Bourdieu and how his
framework can be put into research practice in an international relations
context has been spelled out in detail by Pouliot (2013). Acknowledging
that Bourdieu provides perhaps the most consistent framework of practice
theory, he argues that a three-fold research strategy follows. This consists
of reconstructing
(a) practices within a field, (b) the practical dispositions of actors, and (c) the
positions and struggles between actors within that field. Such an account
pays significant attention to objectifying findings, since it works from the
assumption that practice is entangled in a range of objective relations
(fields). Pouliot points to the importance of multi-method mixes and
methodologi- cal devices such as ‘relational biography’ to objectify
dispositions. For him,
140 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

surveys among the actors in fields are also a plausible means of gathering
insights into the positions and rivalry within them.
Foucaultian genealogy encourages us to trace problematisations
throughout time. The goal becomes identifying those epistemic practices
through which a phenomenon was rendered problematic and distinct
problem solutions were developed (Koopman 2013). It is an invitation to
explore the moments in history where distinct turns were taken and cer-
tain understandings of problems became dominant over others, and to
trace these practices up to the present. Such problems are not
necessarily the grand modern issues, such as sexuality, punishment and
madness that Foucault was concerned with. As demonstrated by Bonditti
et al. (2014) for security studies and Carol Bacchi (2009, 2012) in policy
studies, the approach lends itself to the study of ‘smaller’ contemporary
problems and corresponding policies.
Community of practice research attempts to disentangle the practices
that are shared by a community, the elements of meaning that a commu-
nity uses, or the mechanisms of learning by which one becomes a
member of the community. Adler’s reading of communities of practice
foregrounds the importance of identifying typologies of practices that
are relevant for a distinct community. In his research on security
communities, for instance, he identifies a set of six practices that
characterise a security community (Adler 2008). Others draw on
Wenger’s idea that communities are consti- tuted by a ‘shared repertoire’
of meaning, ‘joint enterprises’ and ‘mutual engagement’, and investigate
each of these elements in detail (Bicchi 2011; Bueger 2013b). Studies of
the learning processes by which one becomes a member of a community
of practice – what Wenger described as legitimate peripheral
participation – have so far not been pursued, but are a reasonable third
research strategy following from the framework.
The narrative approach zooms in on situations in which narratives are
recounted. The attempt is to reconstruct which narrative devices are being
used and how story-telling unfolds, while the invitation is to study the
strategies and tactics by which orders become legitimate, actors are
capa- ble of proceeding with their actions even in the light of
contradictions, and thereby manage to successfully cope with their
everyday lives.
Many narrative research strategies investigate how political events are
portrayed by a variety of narrators in moments of public controversy. What
rhetorical techniques and tricks are used by narrators? Moments of crisis
create an imperative for clarification and the search for a collective solu-
tion, providing researchers with an excellent analytical opening and
meth- odological entry-point. This is because actors often strategically
scramble
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141

to make sense of complex social realities. The use of metaphors is, for
instance, one of the crucial practices of narration, and studying them is
an elucidating strategy for uncovering how actors translate a complex reality
into a simplified image. For example, the metaphor of a ‘sick patient’
requiring immediate treatment was often used by US politicians during
the 2008 economic crisis to justify bank bailout schemes and to make
sense of a world in crisis. One research strategy in the narrative
approach is, therefore, to follow such metaphors, and study how they
relate to nar- rative practices and cultural backgrounds. Additional
starting points are the differing plot patterns used in storytelling, such as
the various genres of romance, satire, comedy and tragedy – initially
outlined by Hayden White (1975: 7–11) – as well as the figuration of
actors as story characters (hero, villain, troubleshooter). These plot
patterns are means of modelling causality in a culturally compatible
manner.
ANT, as a heterogeneous set of studies, does not necessarily lead to a
carved-out research strategy, but rather a spectrum of options. The basic
tenet here is to rely on a strategy that Nicolini (2013) describes as
“zoom- ing in, zooming out”. The first step is to study a configuration by
zooming in on a distinct element. This can be a certain type of relation, a
practice, an object, a concept or a site in which different practices prevail.
The sec- ond step is then to zoom out to gather an understanding of the
effects of the element and the resources the element requires to have
this effect. Walters (2002), for instance, studies the bureaucratic form
and then asks how this object structures European integration. Bueger
and Bethke (2014) zoom in on the concept of ‘failed states’ and then
follow its history and ask what relations between disciplines, policy makers
and international organisations it establishes. Schouten (2014) argues for
initiating research by investigating controversies over the meaning of
security at a distinct site, in this case, an airport. Bueger (2011) argues
for studying a distinct site, the UN Peacebuilding Commission, and then
traces how the prac- tices at this site structure international
peacebuilding. Porter (2012) starts with an investigation of material
elements of the practices of peer review- ing in international political
economy, and then enquires as to their effects.
Pragmatic sociology takes controversies as starting points, and invites
us to study in detail what goes on in these situations. The attempt is to
reconstruct how justification and critique clash with each other and pro-
duce friction. This requires an ethnomethodological gaze and acknowl-
edgement of the creativity of actors. What do actors mobilise in these
situations? How do they invent or re-enact existing orders of meaning?
142 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

It also entails asking whether actors form new creative combinations,

how they manage or settle controversy, and thereby create new forms of
orders. Every situation in which justification and critique meet each
other is a useful analytical entry point for studying the dynamics of
social change. The spectrum of such ‘critical moments’ is potentially
wide; in world poli- tics one finds such moments in, for instance, UN
Security Council debates. Boltanski and other pragmatic sociologists
have demonstrated that practices of justification and critique can be
studied through detailed textual analysis of manuals and textbooks. To
describe the fundamental change of a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ Boltanski
and Chiapello (2007) used management literature, which directs
newcomers on how to become suc- cessful managers. As they argue, such
texts are revealing analytical mate- rial since they are normatively
coloured and prescribe how an ideal practitioner in a particular field
should perform their occupation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007: 529).
They also provide vital culturally and histori- cally specific insight on
how to deal with (global) phenomena such as capitalism. This
approach thereby allows for rich comparative analysis of how
justifications and legitimacy claims are made across various social
boundaries.
As these examples of research strategies document, and as summarised
in Table 6.1, there are several plausible access points from which one can
begin the recursive process of interpretation and formulation of
empirical statements. In principle, we can derive a set of five different
starting points from the approaches to initiate a praxiographic project.
One can start

Table 6.1 Starting points and sensitizing frameworks

Social space Single practice Site Object or Situations
artifact

Field (Bourdieu)
Community of Organizing/ Oligopticon/ Actant (ANT) Controversies
Practice (Wenger) Relating (ANT) Laboratory Boundary (Boltanski,
Actor-Network Storytelling (ANT) Object ANT)
(ANT) (Narrative) (Wenger) Storytelling
Problematising Epistemic (Narrative)
(Foucault) object
(Foucault)

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143

1. from the reconstruction of a figuration, social space, or collective,

such as a field, community of practice or actor-network with the
 goal of describing the relations, struggles, dispositions of that
entity;
2. from a single concrete practice, such as a practice of governing or
knowledge production, analysis of what acts and statements the
practice consists of, and which practical understandings and material
elements it contains;
3. from a distinct ‘site’ that hosts various practices and figurations,
such as an international organisation, a mission headquarter or a
planning cell; the goal is then to describe the multiplicity inherent
in the site and the relations between practices and figurations;
4. from an object or artefact, tracing how these form part of practices
in different sites, such as a bureaucratic form or a policy document,
or
5. with the study of a problematic situation or controversy as a trans-
formative moment in which old practices are challenged and expli-
cated and new practices are formed, such as a UN Security Council
debate, or a crisis moment.

6.3 PRaXIOGRaPHIC METHODS: OBSERVaTIONS,

CONVERSaTIONS, aND aRTEFaCTS
The next question that needs to be asked in designing and planning a
praxiography is: what techniques are available to produce data and to
reconstruct practices? The choice of methods depends on the demands of
the phenomenon one studies, as well as the practicalities of the study, such
as resource and time constraints. As already emphasised, praxiographers
can draw on a rich spectrum of established techniques, but need to trans-
late them to their particular conceptual needs and ontologies.
In the following section, we provide an outline of four basic
techniques that have been used by praxiographers: (1) observing practices,
(2) learning practices, (3) talking about practices, and (4) interpreting
practices from texts and other artefacts. The first two techniques are often
clustered around the notion of ‘participant observation’, the third usually
revolves around different types of ‘interviews’ or ‘focus groups’, while
the fourth implies different forms of ‘text’ or ‘artefact analysis’. The first
techniques (partici- pant observation and interviews) are active modes
of co-production, and involve direct encounters with the participants in a
practice, while text and
144 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

artefact analysis is a more passive, desk-based practice. As already

suggested, the techniques are anything but exclusive, and the majority of
praxiogra- phies will benefit from mixing them. For the purpose of
clarity, we discuss them separately, however.

6.3.1 Observing Practices: Participant Observation

and Fieldwork
Participant observation is often seen as the ‘corresponding method’ to
practice theory, as it allows for the immediate and unnegotiated
recording of practice in real time (Reckwitz 2008; Pouliot 2013; Bueger
2014).
There has been a growing interest in IR in this technique. Much of the
discussion draws on ideas imported from anthropology, and in common
with that field, much confusion remains in IR as to what should or should
not count as participant observation. Should, for instance, attending a
parliamentary assembly or a summit of an international organisation count
as participant observation? To what extent should participant observation
be actual participation in the practices, and to what degree can it be merely
passive observation? To mitigate the confusion, we find Czarniawska’s
(2007) proposal helpful: to reserve the term ‘participant observation’ to
studies in which the researcher has become an actual participant in the
practice he or she investigates. For studies that are more inclined
towards observation, she suggests the broader term of ‘field work’ –
understanding the term ‘field’ as referring to a field of practice, and not
in the restricted Bourdieusian sense.
While there is a rich body of studies to draw on, 9 the two best-known
examples in IR are Neumann’s work on Norwegian diplomacy and
Michael Barnett’s (1997) studies of decision making in the UN General
Secretariat. Barnett worked as political officer at the U.S. mission to the
United Nations, and provided a detailed account of the bureaucratic
processes that played out during the Rwanda peacekeeping disaster of
1994. He later developed his insights further into a general theory of
bureaucratic culture of international administrations (Barnett and
Finnemore 2004).
Neumann’s observations have been published across several studies and
are of direct interest since they explicitly link to IPT. Neumann worked in
the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for three and a half years as a
planner and senior advisor. In his two books At Home with the Diplomats
(2012) and Diplomatic Sites (2013), he documents the practices of the
‘art’ of diplomacy, providing detailed accounts of the life of the diplomat,
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145
the kind of work diplomacy implies, and the bureaucratic practices of the
ministry. This includes studies of when and how to serve food at
ministry meetings (Neumann 2012: 111), how speeches are written for
the minis- ter (2012: 63–93), or how diplomatic dinners unfold (2013).
The methodological principle of participant observation can perhaps
best be understood through Lave and Wenger’s (1991) concept of legiti-
mate peripheral participation. In the research process, the researcher
becomes a participant in the practices of his or her role, organisation or
profession. Over time, the researcher learns what is needed to perform
the practices that are required in the respective setting, how to master
and adjust them across different situations, and how to evaluate the
perfor- mance of others. Neumann, for instance, learned how to write a
speech for the foreign minister, and how to behave appropriately at a
diplomatic din- ner. During this process, the researcher then carefully
records his or her own learning experience, and what is required to
perform a practice. As Zahle (2012) points out, paying attention to the
evaluations of practices in particular can provide key insights in
understanding practical knowl- edge. This can be the evaluations of what
she calls “competent assessors”, or the reactions to and evaluations of
the analyst’s activities.
An important version of participant observation is auto-ethnography,
which centres on self-observations in the process of learning a certain
(set of) practices.10 From a praxiographic stance, auto-ethnography’s
core strength is the way it incorporates the body and material
dimensions into the analysis through direct experience. Louis Waquant’s
(2004) study of the habit and practice of boxing is widely received as a
paradigmatic auto- ethnographic praxiographic study. By practicing in a
gym and participating in amateur tournaments, Waquant elaborated on
the bodily and social formation of the habitus by constantly reflecting on
his own mental, social and bodily transformations. As Sophie Merit
Mü ller (2016) clarifies in her study of ballet practices, the praxiographic
form of auto-ethnography is quite different from others. It is not about
the individual subject’s experi- ence per se, but using the researcher’s
body as a methodological tool. “The researcher’s body is used here as a
highly sensate and tuneable instrument for picking up data” (Mü ller 2016:
707). As Waquant and Mü ller demon- strate, this particular method is
capable of explicating implicit and practical modes of knowledge that are
otherwise difficult to access.
Another variant of participant observation are techniques known as
‘action research’. Action research is a direct interventionist strategy that
centres on participation, rather than observation, implying direct
engagement
146 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

in a field of practice, not only with the intent to learn the practices of the
field, but also to make a contribution to, or an intervention in it. Action
research has primarily been received as a tool for contributing to
transfor- mation and critique, but may also be readily employed as a
praxiographic technique. One takes a rather agnostic stance and
intervenes in order to experiment with(in) the field of practice; if in
auto-ethnography it is the body of the researcher that is the tool of
knowledge production, in action research it is the interventionist and
knowledge production practice.
Action research, as introduced by Olaf Eikeland and Nicolini (2011:
166), provides a way to avoid starting research from a segregated
specta- tor position, and instead begins from below and within, by being
practi- cally immersed in the practice being studied, and by taking the
notion of co-production of knowledge between academics and
practitioners seri- ously. As a praxiographic approach, action research
has become particu- larly influential in organisation studies, where the
approach implies working in and with an organisation, often a company
(Marshall 2011). As Koen Bartels (2012) suggests, action research
implies being “immersed in an ongoing situated process […] with policy
actors to generate knowl- edge by and for acting in problematic
situations”. In action research, therefore, the practice of knowledge
production is moved within the field, and participation and collaboration
with practitioners becomes the pri- mary mode of knowledge
production.
Participant observation, auto-ethnography and action research are
resource-intensive techniques, and require a high degree of commitment
and personal investment in which one’s identity as a scholar and position
in the new role become blurred. It is part of the process that one
becomes what one studies. The dual role one performs in learning how
to partici- pate, intervene, as well as records is demanding. Over time,
the researcher might become naturalised in the practice, a situation
wherein one can no longer assess it from the perspective of a stranger.
Access can also be prob- lematic, and require a lengthy negotiation
process. On occasion, partici- pating may not be possible; for instance, if
a previous career trajectory is required: one cannot become a high-
ranked soldier or a trained physicist overnight. There may also be ethical
or temporal constraints: to study the practices of genocide by participant
observation seems unthinkable. If one is interested in historical practices,
the practices are already in the past, and one cannot learn them through
participation.
Participant observation is, however, only one of the techniques that
allow recording practice in real time. There are similar field techniques that
might be more promising, particularly as a starting point or in
conducting
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147

a project with very limited resources. In the following section, we discuss

the observation of meetings and the technique of shadowing as possible
alternatives.
Observing meetings (often combined with interviews with the partici-
pants) is increasingly used as a technique, and is particularly fruitful in
an international political setting. The observation of meetings,
conferences and summits revolves around the concept of studying
situations in which larger groups of actors meet, negotiate and
deliberate. This provides an ideal opportunity to understand how
different actors engage in joint prac- tices or negotiate their value.
Larger global events such as UN conferences, in particular, are rela-
tively easy to access and have therefore become increasingly studied
through direct observation. A range of anthropologists have spearheaded
such accounts; Paul E. Little’s (1995) observation-based study of the Rio
Earth Summit as a ritual is one of the classic studies. Annelise Riles
(1998, 2006, 2008) observed UN-sponsored women’s rights conferences
in order to understand how actors draft legal documents, deploy
negotiation techniques such as bracketing, and how these documents are
used in fur- ther meetings. Noella Gray (2010) studied the negotiation of
protected areas through observations at a world conservationist
conference, Florian Weisser (2014) observed global climate change
conferences to understand practices of exclusion and the performativity of
documents, while Joel Wainwright and Theresa Wong (2009) studied
global economic gover- nance meetings such as those of the World Trade
Organisation or World Bank in order to understand practices of
hegemony and resistance in global governance.
Treating these meetings as “spaces within which global norms may be
constituted” (Wong and Wainwright 2009: 425), they show how “con-
crete practices of spatial regulation contribute to producing spaces of resis-
tance” (Wong and Wainwright 2009: 403). Campbell and Brosius (2010)
report on a larger research project that studied a global conservationist
meeting. They clearly point to the virtues of taking such an approach:

It is at the physical site of meetings that the interactions, associations, and

politics associated with specific policies are performed in front of an audi-
ence. Further, because of the audience, meetings are where dissenters
often target their resources. Meetings bring together thousands of actors
in one space for a short period of time, and thus represent unparalleled
opportuni- ties to study not only individual agents and institutions of
global environ- mental governance, but also the networks in which they
are embedded. (Campbell and Brosius 2010: 247)
148 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

As they suggest, the sheer size and scope of such meetings creates
spe- cific demands that cannot easily be met by an individual researcher,
how- ever. “It is simply impossible for any single individual to gain a
broader analytical perspective on the events unfolding before them as
these meet- ings proceed apace.” (Campbell and Brosius 2010: 247). To
cope with these constraints, they worked in the realm of what they call
“collaborative ethnography” and observed the meeting with a team of 22
researchers.
Event observations might also be conducted in more formalised set-
tings, such as meetings of governance councils or committees of interna-
tional organisations. Lisa Mcentee-Atalianis (2011, 2013), for instance,
worked as an intern at the International Maritime Organisation; access
to committee meetings provides the background for her detailed study of
the language and identity of the organisation.
Though not widely used in IR to date, shadowing provides a further
option. It is another field technique that allows the recording of real time
practices, involving the following of actors in their day-to-day lives and
recording their activities, encounters and conversations. As Czarniawska
(2007: 55–56) points out, “compared to participant observation,
shadow- ing is easier, because it does not require a simultaneous action
and obser- vation. […] [I]t permits one to preserve an attitude of
outsideness, whereas participant observation creates many opportunities
for ‘going native’”.
Czarniawska (2007) traces the technique back to a seminal study by
Harry F. Wolcott (1973) on school principals. Attempting to investigate
‘What do school principals actually do?’, Wolcott followed a principal in
his day-to-day life for two years. The results of his study were a detailed
description of the personality of the actor, his work, the school, the
system in which he was embedded, and principalship as a form of human
activity (Czarniawska 2007: 32). In another seminal study, Italian
sociologist Marianella Sclavi (1989) followed two school students for
half a year each to compare different educational experiences and
systems.
If these examples show the worth of a prolonged period of shadowing,
Czarniawska (2007) in her work on city managers spearheaded an approach
that draws on short-term, two-week shadowing with several such indi-
viduals. Like participant observation, shadowing is a demanding technique
that requires ongoing negotiation of access. In organisational sociology
and management studies, shadowing has become an approach widely used
to record practice (McDonald 2005). To the best of our knowledge, shad-
owing has not been used systematically in IPT studies or in IR to date.
Initial studies nevertheless showcase the productivity of this technique
in
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the study of politics. Ruth Wodak (2009) shadowed a member of the

European Parliament to understand everyday life as a parliamentarian,
while in his study of daily life in the British government, R.A.W. Rhodes
(2011) shadowed two ministers and three permanent secretaries for five
working days each.
Shadowing is conventionally associated with following actors, that is,
humans. The technique could just as well imply following objects, tech-
nologies and artefacts, however; indeed, many praxiographers have fol-
lowed non-humans. This includes the study of documents to understand
how they are used and how they inform bureaucratic practice and are
cir- culated in and across offices (Walters 2002; Neumann 2007;
Freemann and Maybin 2011), specific technologies, such as bush pumps
or pipelines and how they are applied and integrated into practice at
different sites (De Laet and Mol 2000), or connecting different actors
(Barry 2013), and even incorporeal objects such as ‘the international
financial market’ that can be traced across different sites, such as the
offices of traders (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002). Following objects is
not necessarily easier, however. While access does not have to be
negotiated with the object itself, it must be done with its users.
Moreover, objects can travel with breath-taking speed, often causing
researchers to have to be elsewhere before they have even arrived at
one site.
Participant observation, observing meetings and events, as well as shad-
owing, are all promising techniques for directly observing practice.
Though these techniques require that significant efforts are made to gain
access to the field, prior fieldwork in IR as well as other disciplines indicate
that this access is generally possible, including in sensitive or highly
secu- ritised environments. Field access is not, in principle, more difficult
in an IR context than in other fields, although an intricate and often
sustained negotiation process will always be involved. That said, there
will remain situations in which participant or direct observation is
impossible, includ- ing situations of extreme violence and insecurity, or
historical cases.

6.3.2 Talking Practices in Conversations

Researchers therefore need to be creative and invent other forms of
prax- iographic techniques. The most widely used of these techniques,
inter- views, is perhaps the most problematic. Interviews are frequently
adopted in IR, and the speech subsequently recorded and transcribed is
conven- tionally used as ‘evidence’ for accounts of how things ‘really
happened’.
150 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

The intent of praxiographers is almost the opposite, however: interview-

ing implies talking about practices – that is, something other than the
practices themselves. Interviews primarily provide post-hoc rationalisations
by practitioners, and have rightfully been criticised as providing little
insight into actual practices (Pugh 2013). For Schmidt (2017: 15) “pro-
cedures such as interviewing seem to be inept because they are geared
to make interviewees look retrospectively at social practices and tend to
address them as if they were the authors or theoreticians of practices
they were participating in.” Others are more optimistic about the
prospects of talking about practices, however, pointing to the reflexive
capacities of individuals (Hitchings 2012).
In any case, carefully designed interview strategies are required to make
the empirical material gathered in interviews useful for the reconstruction
of practices. Conceptually, one must differentiate between participant
interviews and expert interviews. In the first type of interview, the objec-
tive is to acquire clues about the practical knowledge of someone who is
a participant in the practice. In the second instance, the interview is a
dia- logue with a fellow observer who has expert knowledge about a
practice, site or figuration.
Participant interviews not only provide an ideal complement to field
work, but can be of value in their own right. A number of interview
strate- gies have been outlined in order to produce empirical material of
value for the reconstruction of practices. Pouliot (2013: 49) points to the
importance of asking interviewees to recount their actual practices and to
treat interviews as practices or performances in their own right. Nicolini
(2009) outlines a sophisticated strategy centred on asking the interviewee
to provide instruc- tions to a virtual double about how to go about his or
her daily life. This “induces the interviewees to produce a highly idealised
narrative description of the practice from a particular moral and normative
angle” (Nicolini 2009: 204). This narrative therefore allows us to unravel
the normative and evalu- ative dimension of practice. Pugh (2013)
develops a related outline of in- depth interviewing that focusses on the
emotional stances of practice.
Expert interviews, by contrast, are conducted with individuals that
have significant experience with a practice or a setting without
necessarily being a part of it. Experts are long-term observers who
closely monitor a field of practice, but not strictly part of it. Examples
include a war correspondent who has been reporting on conflict for
some time, a policy expert who fol- lows a policy issue, or a fellow
academic studying the practice from a differ- ent angle. Through these
experts, we intend to gather interpretations about practices, or to co-
interpret practices with someone who is closer to them.
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 One might also ask this expert to act as observer, in situations where
he or she might have access the researcher cannot gain. Using multiple
such expert observers enables us to make observations at several places at
the same time, and can thereby be a means to investigate how practices
are enacted at different sites. Czarniawska (2007), for instance, suggests
that a productive type of observation becomes possible by conducting
interviews with such expert observers at regular intervals (bi-weekly in
her case).
If it is important to conduct interviews decentered from the individual
and his attitudes, beliefs and memories, conversations about practices can
also be conducted with groups. This technique is known as focus groups.
Trowler (2014: 26) gives a range of examples of strategies that can be
used: this can be “the real-time discussion of alternative points of view,
tensions and conflicts”; “collective discussion of real-life episodes that
respondents have shared”, “specially created fictional accounts can be
offered to groups of respondents for discussion, with prompts”, or using
“mediating artefacts such as pictures, case notes or documents as catalysts
for discussion”. Halkier (2010) reports on the use of focus groups in a
study of the transformation of cooking practices. As she suggests, in
focus groups, knowledge is enacted. She proposes employing a range of
estab- lished analytical techniques to analyse conversations, namely
Goffman- inspired interaction analysis, conversation analysis, discourse
psychology and positioning theory.

6.3.3 Reading Practices: Textual and Artefact Analysis

The second major alternative to field work is to draw on textual analysis
and attempt to ‘read’ practices from texts, documents and visual and
mate- rial artefacts. Textual analysis is of particular importance in the
case of his- torical practices, or when other methods are not viable. A
discussion of the different genres of text and the clues they provide
about practice is crucial here. As Pouliot (2013: 49) suggests, one must
“select particular textual genres that offer a window onto enacted
practices”. We can distinguish initially between (1) ego-documents, (2)
manuals, (3) records of activities and (4) social media data. The most
important form of such texts are ‘ego- documents’ that provide details of
activities carried out by individuals. This includes memoirs, personal diaries,
or written correspondence. Such docu- ments can be identified, for instance,
through archival research. Handbooks and how-to manuals are a second
major genre. These describe practices in an idealised way, often through
step-by-step guidance. Texts that provide detailed recordings of
activities include, for example, court cases, annual
152 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

reports, diplomatic cables, meeting minutes, recordings or transcripts.

Many individuals, organisations or missions furthermore provide detailed
public diaries on their social media accounts. Such documents and artefacts
are widely used in praxiographies, and have often become the primary
empirical material used to reconstruct practices.
Documents require careful reflection of the conditions under which
they were produced, as well as how they are used (Prior 2008). One
would not, for instance, assume that analysing a recipe book provides us
direct access to cooking practices in kitchens around the world, or that a
cata- logue necessarily grants insight into the world of real-life fashion.
Reckwitz (2008) stresses that visual and material artefacts might also
provide us with understandings of practice. Visual artefacts include, for
instance, paintings and photographs of everyday scenes. Live streams of
meetings or recorded videos, such as the rich repertoire we find on video
sharing websites like YouTube, provide indirect observations of practice.
CCTV can also be a useful data source. Also a range of recent experiments
using video in ethnography point to the potential of visual data for the
study of practice (Heath and Hindmarsh 2011).
Also, in the context of the visual or aesthetic turn, scholars in IR have
developed visual methodologies that may be productive for
praxiography. These point to the interpretive repertoire provided by the
arts, visual aes- thetics, or film studies. Axel Heck and Gabi Schlag
(2013), for instance, adopt the iconological approach by Erwin Panofsky
(1970) to demon- strate how a cover of Time magazine, featuring a
young Afghan woman whose ears and nose had been cut off, led to visual
securitisation and strengthened a justificatory narrative for continuing
military intervention. Hansen (2015) draws on the case of hooded
prisoners in the U.S. deten- tion centre at Abu Ghraib to demonstrate
how images ‘make world poli- tics’ through practices of circulation and
appropriation. Andersen and Mö ller (2013) analyse photographs as
examples of invisible forms of war- fare and surveillance being revealed.
Graphic images, such as comics (Shim 2017), cartoons (Hansen 2011),
or even children’s drawings (Aradau and Hill 2013) have also started to
become objects of analysis. Such visual-based studies share the praxio-
graphic intent that images or other visual artefacts should not be inter-
preted as representations, but as artefacts socially and bodily embedded in
practices of showing and seeing. As argued in these discussions, studies
on visual artefacts and media also lead researchers to reflect on their
own visual practices, and imply a process of ‘learning how to see’ (Lisle
2017).
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 Material artefacts can be interpreted, given that they have been made
for practical use. Technologies, as well as architecture, buildings or even
cities can become a source, and one can reconstruct how they were
intended to be used from their design. A classical study is that of
Langdon Winner (1980), who shows how bridge design prevented the
poor and ethnic minorities of New York from gaining access to Long
Island resorts and beaches. Contemporary examples include, for
instance, a study by Endres Dany (2011) considering practices of
democracy through an in- depth investigation of the building of the
Hungarian parliament. In IR, Jenny Edkins (2003) analysed practices of
memory in sites such as memo- rials, museums, and remembrance
ceremonies to explore how people commemorate traumatic events of
wars and genocides. In this broader sense, the spectrum of artefacts a
praxiographer can draw on is wide.
Praxiography differs from other styles of textual analysis by prioritising
certain kinds of ‘text’. However, this is not the only element that makes
praxiography distinct. As Reckwitz pointed out, in analysing such texts,
many of the ideas of discourse analysis are relevant. To do so effectively,
discourse needs to be understood as a collection of practices of
representa- tion that produce the texts one analyses (Reckwitz 2008:
203). The core task of analysing these texts is then to interpret them in light
of the practices necessary to produce them, how practical knowledge or
means of using these texts are ascribed to them, and what ways of receiving
and using these texts are viable. The texts and artefacts are an element of
practices, and should not be understood as having meaning outside of
these practices. Textual analysis in this sense always understands text as
part of a practical configuration, and uses it to deduce practice and larger
configurations.

6.3.4 The Spectrum of Praxiographic Techniques

Table 6.2 summarises the advantages and disadvantages of the different
techniques. It would be a mistake to assume that these praxiographic
tech- niques can be clearly separated from each other. If discussing them
separately makes sense for reasons of clarity, anyone who has conducted
praxiographic research will recognise that in practice, they meld into one
another.
During field work, one will interpret texts and artefacts or encounter
interview-type situations. Halkier (2017: 199) rightfully argues that “in
data production, participant observation usually includes conversations
[…] and many types of interviewing include materials, observations and
exer- cises”. As Czarniawska (2007: 54–55) points out: “You cannot say
‘Sorry,
154 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

Table 6.2 Praxiographic techniques

Advantages Disadvantages

Fieldwork Recording of real-time practices Resource intensive, access

problematic,
Participant Experiencing practical knowledge Access difficult in highly
Observation through learning skilled settings, requires
usually prolonged involvement
Auto-ethnography Bodily experiences Prolonged commitment
Event Observation Direct observation of interaction Cacophony, size and scope,
of multiple actors in one place, speed are difficult to manage
Access often unproblematic by individual
Shadowing Direct observation of Access requires continuous
activities, high mobility re-negotiation
Action Research Participant mode, co-production Loss of academic autonomy,
of knowledge risk of co-optation
Conversations Co-production of interpretations Only in-direct observation,
lack of material dimension of
practices
Participants Clues on activities and Post-hoc rationalisations
evaluative
standards, co-production Second hand interpretations
Experts Interpretations of activities and
background knowledge,
co-interpretation, potentially
indirect recorded observations Second hand interpretations
Focus Groups Collective knowledge,
shared evaluations No direct observation, no
Text Analysis Situations where fieldwork co-production, interpretative
or interviews are not possible, procedures required, selection
large pool of material criteria
Idealized and incomplete
Ego-Documents Clues on the activities and Narratives, difficult to access
evaluations of individuals
Descriptions of Easily available, inter-subjective Idealized and incomplete
Practice descriptions and evaluations narratives
of practice
Visual and Material Indirect observation of practices Very difficult to interpret
Artifacts

I am not doing a participant observation’ when somebody asks you for

help with a falling shelf, and neither can you say ‘You forgot I am
shadowing’ when the person you shadow instructs you to stay in the
office and not to follow her”. How one mixes, blends or prioritises these
strategies and tech- niques not only depends on which set of sensitising
concepts one initiates
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research from, but is also contingent upon the actual (set of) practices
one studies and the resources available.
The spectrum of techniques and strategies we have sketched out is far
from exhaustive. While we discussed the main methods that praxiogra-
phers have developed so far, praxiography is an invitation to be
inventive and to develop and experiment with new strategies and
techniques. This holds especially true in an IR context, given that many of
the phenomena international praxiographers are concerned with are
widely dispersed across sites, practices of interest are enacted
simultaneously at different places, many of the actors studied have a
high degree of mobility, and the circulation of objects and artefacts is fast
paced. These are challenges that call for creativity.
As global praxiographers, including those discussed above, have shown,
a focus on international practices does not prevent proximity to the
actors, direct observations, or detailed empirical reconstruction work. A
lack of empirical material is usually not a problem: in the internet age,
available sources and documents have multiplied, and interlocutors can
be reached via VoIP or email. The question tends to be the opposite: how
to limit the empirical material one uses and analyses. Fieldwork can be
an important device in this regard, since the actors studied guide the
selection proce- dure, and point out which resources are important and
which are not. Being creative also implies going beyond conventional
method divides. Schatzki (2012: 26), for instance, invites us to bridge the
quantitative- qualitative divide and suggests the potential usefulness of
statistics. Quantification can be useful to “provide overviews of the
quantifiable fea- tures of large classes of phenomena and thereby
contribute to the attain- ment of overviews of social affairs”, but only, as
he cautions, if used in conjunction with other methods (Schatzki 2012:
26).

6.4 WRITING PRaXIOGRaPHY

The next challenge concerns how to present the results of a
praxiography. At some point, research has to stop, either when one runs
out of resources, or (ideally) reaches a point of satiation. “The day when
everything said at a meeting is fully understandable is the day to return
to one’s office – not only for reasons of efficient resource management,
but also because com- plete understanding means ‘going native’, at
which point the attention drops and outsidedness is at peril. When one
understands everything, there is nothing left to explain” (Czarniawska
2007: 27). That is when one faces the question of how to write a
praxiography.
156 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

In ethnography and interpretive policy analysis, a nascent discussion

addresses the problem of how to write, which is also relevant for
praxiog- raphy. Most IPT texts to date have opted for conventional
narrative styles to present their research. This traditionally implies
discussion of literature, clarification of the contribution of the text,
elaboration of theory and pre- sentation of the empirical material in the
form of one or two cases. Such a style of presentation does not necessarily
lend itself to praxiography, since it does not reflect its core premises of
the recursive link between theory and the empirical, nor does it provide
adequate engagement with the prac- tices studied.
Just as with theorising and researching, we should understand writing
as a practice. This approach has at least two consequences. Firstly, as shown
in detail by Engert and Krey (2013), writing in social science should be
understood as an epistemic practice in which not only representations of
prior academic research are presented, but in which and with which knowl-
edge is actively produced. In other words, the text is a laboratory of
social scientists in which they produce facts and other phenomena by
making connections between prior texts, the world studied and the
readers.
Secondly, and particularly if one takes a strong stance concerning the
performativity of practices, writing about practices is much more than
reporting results; it is a practice constitutive of the phenomena (the
prac- tices) one writes about. In ethnography, it is a well-established
proposition that in writing, reality is not represented but transformed,
and meaning not found but created (Clifford and Marcus 1986).
Mü ller (2016: 711, emphasis in original) argues that the goal of prax-
iographic writing must be “to transgress the boundaries of ‘conventional’
ways of written representation: instead of striving toward producing exact
(and thus “objective”) replica of social life, [it is to…] try to create infor-
mative and expressive sketches that capture what the respective research is
interested in.” As Rouse (1996) points out, the core criteria of academic
writing is not so much adequate representation and truth, but
intelligibil- ity. An academic narrative has to make sense for and inspire a
certain read- ership. To do so it needs to connect to what they already
know and what is familiar to them.
Discussing ethnographic narratives, Schwartz-Shea and Yanow (2009)
stress the importance of ‘trust’ to intelligibility, in that successful writing
implies establishing a relation of trust between reader and author. They
outline six criteria that contribute to a trustworthy narrative, pointing to
different forms of reflexivity. This is, firstly, the level of detail, or
‘thickness’
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of a narrative, which demonstrates that the researcher actually has made
significant efforts to understand a practice. Secondly, reflexivity towards
the researcher’s own position “shows that the researcher understands
herself as the means, the instrument through which the research (as well
as its reporting) has been produced.” (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2009:
60). Thirdly, triangulation clarifies that the researcher has made efforts
to understand a phenomenon by drawing on as many analytical tools
and perspectives possible. Fourthly, an “audit” describes the “changes
to the original research design made in response to situational realities”
(Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2009: 81). Fifthly, reflexivity towards
negative cases demonstrates that the researcher has considered that things
could be otherwise and might play out very differently in other
situations. Sixthly, a documented process by which the researcher has
verified the narrative produced with the interlocutors it draws upon, for
instance in sending them drafts, or discussing the narrative.
Yanow (2009) adds the importance of transparency, that is, a suffi-
ciently detailed description of the research process and choices a researcher
has made (e.g. the number of days spent in the field, the choice of indi-
viduals to shadow, or the selection of interviewees).
Intelligibility also implies that a text is written in a style that is accept-
able to the audience. This is the main reason why the majority of IPT
texts have opted for conventional styles, since they aim to reach a wide
IR readership, especially those not yet convinced of the value of praxio-
graphic accounts. Nevertheless, one can take advantage of the practice
theoretical trading zone, recognising that the potential readership is broad
and includes other disciplines. Moreover, there is a clear trend towards a
broadening of the ways in which IR studies can be presented, and that
dif- ferent styles are becoming increasingly accepted.
Indeed, there are other ways to achieve intelligibility. As Czarniawska
(2008: 14) points out, “literary theory […] has an old recipe for achieving
the goal of being read: to dramatise.” She points to heroic stories that
centre the narrative on a lead protagonist, fictionalisation, or drawing on
styles we find in movie documentaries, such as Sweetwood’s Beerland,
discussed in the opening chapter.
A revealing example from practice theory that draws on the style of a
heroic narrative is Hendrik Wagenaar’s (2004) study of administrative
practice. In the article, Wagenaar draws on an interview with an
adminis- trator to develop an account of the creativity of the milieu. He
introduces Judy, a 34-year-old lawyer working in the Dutch immigration
ministry, and
158 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

uses her voice to expand central categories and dilemmas of

bureaucracy. In the article, we learn a great deal about Judy and what she
does, but it remains entirely open, as well as largely irrelevant to the
argument, whether Judy is a fictional character or not.
Fictionalisation is a style that has been used in various ways in
ethnog- raphy as well as science and technology studies. A prime
example from practice theory is Bruno Latour’s Aramis or the Love of
Technology (1996). The book presents a study of the failure of a
transport technology, written as a detective novel.11 The plot involves a
murder entwined with a love story. Latour asks, ‘Who killed Aramis, the
transportation technology?’, and comes up with the answer that Aramis
died because nobody loved it. While this is certainly a unique example in
the way it tends towards fic- tion – Latour speaks about “scientifiction” –
there are various degrees to which narratives can be fictionalised.
An experiment in innovative IR writing that has received much atten-
tion is Elizabeth Dauphinee’s The Politics of Exile (2013a). Throughout
the book, about experiences of war in Bosnia, Dauphinee attempts to
avoid conventional ways of presenting research, and experiments instead
with fictionalisation. She provides a narrative of an unnamed protagonist –
a professor of international politics in Canada – involving stories of a
handful of men and women caught up in the Bosnian war and, later, their
exile in Toronto. The narrative centres around one researcher’s
encounter with a Bosnian Serb named Stojan Sokolovic, but also involves
other pro- tagonists such as a young man refusing to go to war, a priest
who listens to confessions of war crimes, and a young woman who tries
to commit suicide after her partner is killed. These multiple voices and
personal sto- ries provide insights into the horrors of the Bosnian war, its
aftermath, and how IR scholars familiarise themselves with these events.
Dauphinee vividly illustrates wartime Bosnia, a place that often exists
as an abstract notion of a onetime warzone, by exploring different
figures, rituals, and practices such as dinners and funerals. In a later
reflection, Dauphinee (2013b: 350) explains this form of writing as
follows: “trauma and grief must be shown in order to be fractionally
intelligible: ‘the war’ lies in every gesture, in every moment of
musculature, in every silence in which the imperative to witness is too
exhausting to contemplate too urgent to ignore”. Though Dauphinee’s
work is perhaps the most ambi- tious in terms of its narrative prose,
other IR researchers have engaged in similar experiments in
fictionalisation to recount war experiences (e.g. Sylvester 2012; Park-
Kang 2014).
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 As Humphrey and Watson (2009) point out, since the researcher is
the core instrument in the research process and the goal is not to
obtain ‘truth’, narratives are invariably contrived to some degree. There is
a varia- tion in how far one develops this as a style, however.
Humphrey and Watson (2009) discuss four approaches: the plain style
largely attempts to tell the narrative by following the standard writing
models of social sci- ences, and presents research as a ‘case’. The
enhanced style “uses the pre- sentational techniques of the novelist:
descriptive scene setting, use of dialogues, author as character in the
narrative; inclusion of emotional responses by authors and subjects,
attention to the perspectives and stories of subjects” (Humphrey and
Watson 2009: 43). The semi-fictionalised style represents a more
manipulated version, restructuring the events of several investigations
into a single narrative, for instance. This is especially important when one
draws on sensitive empirical material that would not be publishable
otherwise. The fictionalised style combines elements from the second
and third style, but goes further in its attempt to construct “an
entertaining and edifying narrative […]. Characters and events may be
‘created’ out of the material gathered” (Humphrey and Watson 2009:
43). Documentaries are another source of inspiration. As Rens van
Munster and Casper Sylvest (2015: 230) have argued, the genre
provides “a par- ticular arrangement that creatively brings into play the
boundaries between fiction and fact, entertainment and education, or
data and theory.” Documentaries give voice to participants and aim at
providing immediate experiences. They “assemble first-order
representations and data such as speeches, interviews, and media footage
and weave them into entertaining and, increasingly, commercially viable
second-order interpretations” (van Munster and Sylvest 2015: 230). What
one can learn from documentary narrative styles is, primarily, how to
construct narratives that include dif- ferent places and voices and move
between these in one story without creating a cacophony. Theoretical
or methodological considerations and the author’s own voice can then
become one of the sites and voices that
one moves between.
Theorising and conceptual development do not necessarily have to
come first in a narrative; one might tell a story of generalizing, extracting
and abstracting, ending with theory. Alternatively, one might want to
retain the abductive spirit and jump continuously between theorising
and one or several empirical narratives, or employ a ‘Russian doll’
plotline, with each layer revealing further elements. Neumann’s (2007)
article on speechwriting in the Norwegian foreign ministry, for
instance, places a
160 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

detailed description of the practice at the centre of the narrative, as he

introduces details of each stage of speech production and briefly reflects
on them in theoretical terms. He then ends his narrative in discussing the
links between his observations and different theoretical accounts.
A common objective of writing praxiography is to avoid the alienation
that disciplinarity often produces between academics and the worlds they
write about. As Dauphinee (2013b: 349) argues, writing can instead be
understood as a “thread of connection” that follows the logic of hope in
terms of overcoming political hardship, rather than the truth-seeking form
of rational argumentation that dominates the academy. Reflecting on
writ- ing as a creative practice that overcomes the dichotomies of truth
and fic- tion as well as academic and literary writing highlights the practical
political effects that writing can produce (Edkins 2013).
Experimenting with new techniques to attract a readership and to
present the unruly world of practice in a different light is an invitation to
learn from literature theory, journalism, and filmmaking. It implies taking
risks, which is important, not least in finding or constructing wider
audiences beyond the immediate peer group, ideally including the
practitioners studied.
While these practitioners might not necessarily agree with our narra-
tives, that is not our primary objective. To write a praxiography is to add a
narrative to the field of practice. As Czarniawska puts it, “an observer can
never know better than an actor; a stranger cannot say more about any
culture than a native, but observers and strangers can see different
things than actors and natives can” (Czarniawska 2007: 21, emphasis in
origi- nal). Identifying what matters, and communicating it to a wide
audience: that is the point of doing praxiography.

NOTES
1. See, in particular, the contributions in Jonas et al. (2017), and, in the con-
text of German sociology, Kalthoff et al. (2008), and Schä fer et al. (2015).
2. See, in particular, Karin Knorr Cetina’s work (e.g. 1981, 2001), but also
the thriving discussion on the “social life of methods” in social science,
summarised in Greiffenhagen et al. (2015).
3. See, for example, contributions in Jonas et al. (2017).
4. Compare the special issue of the European Journal of International
Relations on this matter (Wight et al. 2013).
5. See, for instance, Kratochwil (2011) for whom theory and practice are
opposite poles and hence the notion of ‘practice theory’ doesn’t make
much sense. As Stern (2003: 201–203) argues, much of the debate on
the status of theory is related to different interpretations of Wittgenstein.
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161
 As he concludes, “perhaps it is the protean character of practice theory,
the way in which it holds out the promise of accommodating both the aim
of rigorous theory of society, and the desire for a close description of
particu- lars, that has made it both so attractive and so hard to pin down.”
(Stern 2003: 203).
6. For related discussions on techniques of generalisation, see the
discussion on the methodology of case studies, in particular Flyvbjerg
(2006), Ruddin (2006) and Thomas (2010).
7. Other scholars prefer the term praxeology to speak about the
methodology of practice theory. Given that “-ology” refers to a subject of
study or a branch of knowledge, rather than an epistemic activity, we
prefer the suffix of “-graphy”.
8. Trowler (2014) provides a useful short discussion of the relation
between praxiography and ethnography. For the broader discussion on
the twists and turns of recent ethnography and its reception in international
relations and political science, see the discussions in Kapisezewski et al.
(2015), Eckl (2008), Vrasti (2008), Sande Lie (2013), Wedeen (2010),
Kuus (2013), De Volo, and Schatz (2004), Stepputat and Larsen (2015),
Bueger and Mireanu (2014), and the contributions in Schatz (2009).
9. Summarised, for instance, in Bueger and Mireanu (2014) and Schatz (2009).
10. For the more general (not practice-focussed) debate on auto-
ethnography in international relations, see Brigg and Bleiker (2010),
Dauphinee (2010), Lö wenheim (2010), Doty (2010), Neumann (2010)
and Hamati-Ataya (2014).
11. For a discussion of the book’s style and underlying methodology see
Czarniawska (2008) and Austrin and Farnsworth (2005).
 CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Completing the Practice Turn

If one may meaningfully speak about a ‘practice turn’, it remains fair to

say that it has not yet been completed; more needs to be done to realise
the full potential of practice thinking, and while the community of
scholars is growing, it remains small. IPT has significantly matured over
the years; practice theorising has been around since at least the 1980s in
social the- ory, sociology or anthropology, but the call to ‘turn’ or ‘re-
turn’ to prac- tice has only recently been heard in the study of
international relations, particularly when compared to other disciplines.
If the 2001 edited vol- ume ‘The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory’
(Schatzki et al. 2001) was a game changer in other disciplines, in IR, the
agenda-setting efforts of Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot (2011a, b)
brought significant attention to practice theory. Since then, IPT has
thrived, and a rich body of literature has been developed.
Research relying on what we have termed the main approaches of IPT
forms the heart of that literature. While it was initially Bourdieusian
research and the community of practice approach that was associated with
turning to practice, today we see a much wider spectrum of approaches
being developed. Importantly, the approaches we outline tend not to be
followed dogmatically. Instead of exegesis, creative combinations of
approaches and their concepts under the general header of practice theory
are favoured. The concepts, strategies and ideas of the seven approaches
we outlined will continue to form main pillars of IPT in the near future.

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Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-
73350-0_7
164 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

It is important to note, however, that there are other practice approaches

available to speak to issues of the international. Several of these have
already been introduced to the discipline, but did not receive sufficient
attention in this book, including the discussion of classical pragmatism and
the ways it can be developed as an approach of IPT,1 adoptions of
Wittgenstein’s language philosophy (Fierke 2002), the cultural sociology
of Ann Swidler (as introduced by Sending and Neumann 2011), assem-
blage theory that develops insights from the work of Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari (Acuto and Curtis 2013), or Karin Knorr Cetina’s theory of
epistemic practices and infrastructures (Bueger 2015).
Other approaches that have notably influenced the practice debate in
other disciplines hold significant potential for IPT as well: activity theory
in the tradition of Lev S. Vygotsky, the work of Judith Butler, the symbolic
interactionism of Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel’s programme of eth-
nomethodology, the normative practice theory of Alasdair MacIntyre,
and the social theories of Charles Taylor, Margaret Archer and others.
The more recent practice theories of Barbara Czarniawska, Silvia
Gherardi, Stephen Kemmis, Davide Nicolini, Andreas Reckwitz, Joseph
Rouse, Robert Schmidt, Elizabeth Shove or Stephen Turner, which have
signifi- cantly influenced our discussion without being outlined as
‘approaches’, also hold great promise for further development in IR, as
do discussions on ‘strategy as practice’ or ‘institutional work’.
Integrating this body of work into IPT will provide further important
concepts and fresh thinking, and will make IPT an even more
heterogeneous field than it already is, as well as a stimulus for increasing
the inter-disciplinary exchange of scholars in the trading zone.
That IPT is a heterogenous movement is what we hoped to clarify
through the metaphor of a trading zone that includes many participants.
While practice theorists share a range of basic commitments, there are ten-
sions and differences between them. Our core argument is that the onto-
logical puzzles that lead to such tensions are productive challenges for
pushing IPT forward. We outlined a broad range of challenging issues,
including the question of how stable practices are, how to conceptualise
change, how the micro and the macro are related, whether flat ontologies
successfully transcend scales in world politics, whether norms can be sepa-
rated out from practices, whether normativity is the vital element of
prac- tice or merely one dimension of it, how to integrate non-human
elements and conceptualise bodies, and how to relate reflexivity and
performing research to theorising. None of these questions are
definitively ‘solvable’.
CONCLUSION: COMPLETING THE PRACTICE TURN
165
There are no grounds upon which we would be able to formulate the
right position; rather, looking through a multi-perspective lens and
recognising that no single approach provides one-size-fits-all answers is the
preferred strategy. Appreciating the tensions within practice theory,
clarifying differ- ences and using these creatively will allow to push the
debate in promising new directions.
The work on ontological questions will, moreover, continue to be one
of the vehicles through which the relation between practice theoretical
accounts and other accounts of the international will be discussed. For
instance, discussing order and change allows to draw distinctions with
the grand theories of IR and their understanding of structures and
change, or the debate on normativity provides potential collaboration
between norm constructivism, international political theory and IPT.
This is an opportu- nity to convince scholars about the value of IPT and
the insights it can provide; for instance, in pointing to those facets of
international political life that other perspectives miss. Defining
differences vis-à -vis other per- spectives should not, however, be
undertaken predominantly on philo- sophical grounds. As we have
emphasised throughout this volume, IPT is an empirical project rather
than a theoretical one.
Understood in this sense, practice theory provides a methodological
orientation for praxiographic research. It is the praxiographies – the actual
studies of practices – that make the difference. Compared to elaborating
on conceptual vocabularies and their strengths, too little debate has
taken place in terms of how to perform praxiographic researching and
writing practices. As we argued in Chap. 6, praxiography sets out from
the under- standing that methods are practices, as is writing about
practices. We high- lighted the importance of creativity and improvisation
in praxiography, as opposed to working with a rigid set of ideal methods.
To provide inspira- tion for studies, we outlined some of the repertoire
of praxiographic tools and strategies. Tools and strategies from
qualitative research and ethnog- raphy, ranging from participant
observation and action research to inter- views, text, video and
architecture analyses can become useful praxiographic methods if translated
in an appropriate way. Using this repertoire will pro- duce an increasing
amount of interesting and enlightening insights about international life.
In this concluding chapter, we come back to one of the questions
raised at the beginning of the book, namely how to think about IPT as a
project, and where it is situated in IR. One might contend, given the
open idea of a trading zone and the contention that it is the practices
that matter, that
166 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

the question of within which disciplinary structures practices are studied

in becomes moot. While we would like to agree, it remains important to
consider IPT’s position in the “practical configuration of IR” (Bueger and
Gadinger 2017), as well as its future path.
As a way of summarising our discussion, we firstly return to the
prom- ises with which practice theory was introduced to IR. We briefly
evaluate the current situation, starting with a discussion on the question of
whether practice theory has already lived up to its promises. Following
that, we speculate about the future of IPT by considering three scenarios;
the first implying that IPT is becoming an even more heterogeneous
trading zone, the second positing that it is being normalised into a
paradigm, and the third proposing that it should be understood as a
passing fashion, destined to fade away.

7.1 LIVING UP TO ITS PROMISES?

Along with new perspectives, approaches and, particularly, ‘turns’ come
great promises of what these innovations allow us to do, see and say dif-
ferently. These promises not only provoke calls for evidence of whether
the perspective has actually added value, but also in how far the practice
turn has already been completed. In this section, we provide a short
evalu- ative review asking whether IPT has already lived up to its promises,
and if not, evaluating the prospects that it eventually will.
As argued in the introduction, practice theory comes with several
promises:

1. to get closer to the actions, routine and lifeworlds of the practitio-

ners who practice international relations;
2. to produce knowledge that is of relevance beyond the immediate
group of peers, and might even address societal concerns, or con-
tribute to crafting better political responses;
3. to avoid and overcome (traditional) intellectual dualisms, such as
structure and agency, micro and macro, or the ideational and the
material;
4. to develop a perspective that is receptive to change as well as
reproduction;
5. to more fully integrate material aspects, ranging from bodily move-
ments to objects and artefacts.
CONCLUSION: COMPLETING THE PRACTICE TURN
167

So far, IPT has arguably performed well relative to some of these

prom- ises, but less so on others. The verdict remains mixed, and more
work will have to go into delivering some of the promises. Clear success
appears to have been achieved in promises number three and five,
however.
Together with the broader debate on ‘new materialism’, IPT has led to
a new appreciation for the material side of international life. Scholars have
become increasingly attuned to a broad host of objects, artefacts and
tech- nology, and their role in international practice. Whether it is
documents or surveillance technology, the worlds described by IR
scholars today are populated by more than just humans. The importance
of bodies and their movement has attracted less attention, but is clearly
on the agenda.2 One can plausibly expect that that this trend will
continue, that more attention will be paid to the material, and that
studies will investigate not only docu- ments or technologies, but will also
scrutinise aspects such as architecture or bodily expressions much more
closely.
Promise three also represents a success story. The new vocabularies
introduced by IPT have the clear intention of avoiding dualisms whilst
sketching out a more complex and receptive universe of concepts. The
notion of practice in itself is a mediator of structure and agency, as are
concepts such as habitus, doxa, field, narrative, communities of practice,
justification and translation, to mention just a few. IPT research has clearly
shown that research does not have to begin by accepting binaries as
given. At the same time, practice theory remains at constant risk of
introducing new binaries and dualisms, however. The modern mindset
easily creeps in, and temptation exists to form new binaries: practice vs.
structure, practice vs. narrative, action vs. practice, doxa vs. habitus,
routine vs. reflexive action, or practice theory vs. praxiography are
examples of this. Constant reminders of the importance of an anti-dualist
stance and the rejection of fixed taxonomies will continue to be
necessary. Favouring relationalism and performativity over dualisms and
rigid categories is, and remains, one of the core drivers of practice
theory.
Promise four, to develop a perspective that is receptive to change,
remains, as we saw in Chap. 5, a major challenge that requires ongoing
attention, not least in responding to those critics who argue that practice
theory can easily slip into statism (Duvall and Chowdhury 2011). The
ques- tion of change has nonetheless become a focal point of attention.
Although there is some risk of falling into a dualism of two modes of
practice – as routine and as reflective action – researchers have started to
develop con- vincing answers in terms of how practice theories can
conceptualise change (see, in particular, Schindler and Wille 2015; Hopf
2017). The strategies
168 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

outlined, whether in terms of studying how actors respond to moments

of crisis, or how they maintain order in the face of practice breakdowns,
have not yet fully translated into empirical research, but we expect that
that they will do so in due course.
Promise one, to get closer to the activities, routines and performances
of the practitioners of international relations, presents a mixed record.
On one hand, there is a clear intention among IPT scholars to seek
proximity to practice. There is a turn towards working more empirically,
and research driven by ethnographic or in-depth interpretive methods is
becoming increasingly widespread. In the study of diplomacy,
researchers now seek to speak to the diplomats and participate in their
meetings, for instance, while in security studies, researchers shadow
security experts or spend time at airports, exposition centers, or military
headquarters. The narratives of IPT have, without doubt, become richer
and thicker. We now know more about what happens in NATO (Pouliot
2010a, b; Schmitt 2017), at the United Nations Security Council (Pouliot
2016; Ralph and Gifkins 2017) or the European Union (Bremberg and
Bicchi 2017).
One the other hand, there is a clear continuation of a trend in which
philosophical discussions, conceptual development and abstract reasoning
is prioritised. Quality of research is not judged by its capacity to tell us
more about a dedicated practice, or how thought provoking, illuminating
and thick the empirical narrative is; rather, it is often the philosophical
meta-point that counts as a ‘contribution’. There remains the risk that
such prioritisation will not change in the long run, not least because of
disciplin- ary reward structures. IR, in contrast to anthropology, for
example, con- tinues to be a discipline that favours theory and
abstraction over intensive empirical work. The ‘grand’ publications in
the discipline are those which outline a ‘new’ theory or advance an
existing one. In these publications, the empirical hardly ever gets beyond
the status of mere ‘illustration’. Often, empirical narratives, particularly if
they do not advance a causal story, are evaluated to present ‘policy
commentary’, or, even worse, to be simply a good ‘story’ or merely a
‘description’. Practice theory will have to challenge this mindset;
enriching our understanding of what practitioners ‘do’, will imply more
description and deeper empirical narratives.
Getting beyond current disciplinary evaluations and reward structures,
and making the case that any theory’s worth depends on careful
empirical reconstruction work, will require continued efforts.
Foregrounding meth- ods and an understanding of theory as
methodological orientation will be a valuable strategy here.
CONCLUSION: COMPLETING THE PRACTICE TURN
169
 A more negative evaluation can be made in regards to promise two,
that of producing knowledge that is of broader relevance, addresses soci-
etal concerns and can drive change. IPT scholars have not advanced any
strong case or demonstrated how their knowledge actually makes a
differ- ence, for example how the study of practice can inform the
everyday work of practitioners, or can be of more general societal
interest. Similar to other disciplines, IR continues to nurture a
disciplinary split between those doing theory (or ‘science’) and
publishing in prestigious journals (that are hardly ever read by anyone
outside the immediate discipline), and those commenting on policy and
current developments as ‘experts’ in the media, via working papers or
other widely recognised outlets.
One of the promises of practice theory is to rebuild a bridge and pro-
duce theory-driven scholarship that can speak to societal concerns, and,
indeed, also inform policy formulation. The quality of the praxiographic
narratives developed and the way these provide new illuminating re-
descriptions of international activities is the core access point for
broader relevance and making a difference.3
Practice theory, moreover, provides a rich repertoire of strategies of
how to intervene in policy processes and how to relate to societal con-
cerns. Three such strategies are outlined in Berling and Bueger (2017):
firstly, a strategy of acting as an organic intellectual that directly
supports societal (and often marginalised) groups, secondly, developing
collective intellectuals that use their academic autonomy as the basis on
which to act as experts in societal decision-making processes, and,
thirdly, the strategy of intervening in practice through ironic re-
descriptions. These are but three of the strategies for intervention that
can be derived from practice theoretical thinking; there are doubtless
many others.
In our discussion of methodology, we pointed to another possibility,
that is, participatory action research. In this strategy, one does not distin-
guish between knowledge production and intervention, but develops
research in concert with practitioners. To live up to the promise of making
a difference in the world implies leaving scholarly comfort zones. It is to
turn from a spectator mode of analysis towards participation and immer-
sion. Practice theory provides the tools for successful immersion and inter-
ventions, and IPT will also benefit from experimenting with ways of how
to draw in wider audiences.
In summary, since practice theory was introduced in IR, it has made
significant steps towards changing how research is conducted. The prac-
tice turn in IR is a success, though not all of the promises associated with
turning to practice have been fulfilled. The scorecard remains mixed, and
further effort is required.
170 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

7.2 PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE: THREE SCENaRIOS

Given the success of IPT in establishing itself as one of the most
important innovations in the discipline of IR, what are its long-term
prospects? What will be left after the practice turn is fully completed?
What legacy will it leave for the discipline, and beyond? Thinking about
these questions is important in at least two regards. Firstly, they are
essential questions for informing individual career choices – is it worth
investing intellectually and engaging in IPT if one wants to pursue an
academic career or make a difference in the world? Secondly, addressing
these issues is to give inter- national practice theory a telos – a sense of
direction in which it is or may be heading. There are at least three
plausible long-term scenarios, each of which stresses a different impact
that IPT may have: a thriving trading zone, paradigmatisation, and
mainstreaming. In the following section, we investigate each scenario in
detail, using an earlier discussion (Bueger and Gadinger 2014) as the
baseline.
In our first scenario, IPT becomes an ever-growing trading zone in
which heterogeneity increases as further concepts and approaches are
introduced. Exchanges with various disciplines interested in questions of
international relations increase, IPT attracts a growing number of
researchers, and practitioners who are interested purely in using the tool-
boxes and results generated in the zone also start participating. As the
trading zone metaphor implies, IPT does not become anything like a set-
tled community of scholars or develops a fixed identity. Instead, it
remains a loose network of scholars and practitioners interested in various
facets of IPT. Some of the ties within this network become stronger over
time, as scholars agree on matters such as the strengths and weaknesses of
the dif- ferent approaches. Other ties necessarily remain looser,
particularly as insights on more and more kinds of practices are
introduced.
The overall direction in this scenario is the multiplication of connections
between different researchers and practitioners and to increase ‘trade’, that
is, communication about practice theory and its challenges, as well as to
enable creative, or eclectic combinations of approaches. This does not
nec- essarily imply working towards consensus and agreement; rather, the
ongo- ing concern is to appreciate the controversies over the challenges
and the tensions between approaches, as well as to facilitate the
conditions under which the accompanying creative power can be
harnessed.
Our second scenario follows from the first. As historian of science
Ilana Lö wy (1992) has shown, trading zones often become stabilised as
trade increases. As she argued by drawing on the history of the
discipline of
 CONCLUSION: COMPLETING THE PRACTICE TURN
171

immunology, traders are able to establish a common identity, a common

language and repertoire of tools. The trading zone starts to grow into
what she terms a more stabilised “pidgin zone”, or even into a more fully
institutionalised “creole zone”, membership of which provides the main
professional identity.
This leads us to our second scenario, in which IPT grows from a
trading zone into a creole zone that provides a common identity. IPT
becomes a new paradigm in the discipline, comprised of an established
in-group and a periphery, seminal authors, agreed definitions and tools,
a common ‘thought style’ and a set of clearly laid out questions to be
addressed. IPT becomes stylised in handbook chapters, and is discussed
in IR textbooks as a paradigm alongside realism and constructivism.
Someone may then state, with the same conviction that some would have
today in claiming to ‘be’ a constructivist: “I am a practice theorist”. Such
a scenario would imply that scholars increasingly agree on core concepts
and their definition.
This would not be an inherently negative development, since the het-
erogeneous, and sometimes confusingly plural character of IPT raises the
question of how much homogeneity is actually needed for furthering
research. Do we need to agree on concepts? If so, do we need concepts
other than that of practice? This scenario would also make IPT more
accessible, widen participation, and better introduce newcomers to the
discussion. It is also a risky scenario, however, given that practice theory
might then lose one of its core strengths, namely its adaptability and flex-
ibility across different research situations.
A third scenario, equally worthy of consideration, is that of disappear-
ance or mainstreaming. Academic disciplines are subject to trends, fash-
ions and fads (Bethke and Bueger 2014; Bort and Kieser 2011) as new
perspectives, turns, and theorists come and go. At some point in time the
discussion (or hype) surrounding a practice turn, practice theory and the
concept of practice may fade away. Such a scenario is not unlikely; as
Randall Collins (1998) shows in his intellectual history of philosophy,
aca- demic disciplines have limited attention spans and are subject to
what he calls the “law of small numbers”. Over the longue durée,
intellectual space is usually occupied by no more than three, and a
maximum of six theoreti- cal positions. IPT might well fail and fall out of
the picture.
Moreover, concepts tend to have distinct lifecycles. Once they have
served the purpose of intellectual renewal, many become forgotten.
Johan Galtung (1986: 15–17) describes the life of concepts as going
through a cycle in which they follow a five-step path: (1) a fresh concept
is co-opted from outside for the purpose of organisational renewal; (2)
the concept
172 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

becomes part of texts and manifestos; (3) the concept’s meaning is

gradu- ally changed to accommodate everyone; (4) the concept has been
inte- grated, and can no longer serve the purpose of renewal; and (5) a
new concept comes along and replaces the old one.
The concept of practice, and the entire notion of practice theory, may
suffer a similar fate. This scenario allows for an optimistic and a pessimistic
reading. From an optimistic standpoint, the decline of practice might lead
to the integration of core insights from practice theory into the disci-
pline – a sort of mainstreaming process. As Ulrich Beck and Wolfgang
Bonß (1989) argue, the disappearance of a term or insight does not
neces- sarily point to its failure; on the contrary, it can indicate success, as
insights might be incorporated into everyday thinking and practice to the
degree that they no longer need to be specifically highlighted. This is,
quite obvi- ously, difficult to prove, and a pessimistic reading of the same
situation would suggest that declining attention or even the
disappearance of practice theory would imply its failure; practice theory
would have been merely a fad; nothing more.
The above represent three plausible scenarios of how IPT may
develop. Using 2014 as a baseline, to what extents can we identify trends
and ten- dencies for these scenarios?
That year, Erik Ringmar (2014: 1) argued that the practice theoretical
project “will fail”. If by 2015, Adler and Pouliot (2015) were still hesitant,
suggesting that “at this stage the jury is still out”, by 2017 we can confidently
argue that Ringmar was mistaken. A search on Google Scholar provides
ini- tial quantitative evidence: over 630 results appear for the term
“international practice theory” covering publications between 2010 and
2017.4
IPT has grown not only when evaluated quantitatively in terms of
pub- lication, but also in substance, with practice theory now being
discussed across all subfields of IR, whether it be in international
political economy, security studies, peace research, international
organisations, or the more specialised fields of study on diplomacy,
peacebuilding, European, Asian or African politics. It seems that no area
of scholarship has been left untouched by the turn to practices. Also an
increasing number of sections and panels at international conferences
focus on IPT. With this quantita- tive and substantial expansion of IPT
scholars, which is likely to continue, the field has become more plural
and diverse.
If a 2015 review led us to express concern that the debate was being
dominated by a discussion of Bourdieu’s vocabulary (Bueger and Gadinger
2015), this appears less worrying from the perspective of 2017. Recently
introduced approaches, such as ANT, pragmatic sociology and the work
of
 CONCLUSION: COMPLETING THE PRACTICE TURN
173

Boltanski, or the ontology of Schatzki, have become more widely used

and moved to the centre of debate. New vocabularies and approaches
continue to be added to the debate. 5 With this expansion, the kinds of
international practices studied and the empirical basis of IPT have also
been enriched. As outlined above, there is, moreover, a visible interest in
exploring the relation between IPT and other theorising in IR,
particularly within the international political sociology and norm
constructivist debate. The rela- tions between IPT and other turns are
increasingly observed and dis- cussed, ranging from the visual and
aesthetic turn, to new materialism or the affective turn. However, one
cannot come to the same conclusion regarding inter-disciplinarity. IR’s
version of the practice turn appears largely unrecognised in other
disciplinary contexts, and remains insular that sense.6
Do these observations imply that the first scenario is what we expect
to unfold? The IPT debate has certainly become more heterogeneous and
more pluralistic; no one approach dominates, and definitions are not set-
tled. Internal clarifications and divergences continue to be explored, and
there is an ongoing debate on the particular identity of IPT and what
actu- ally constitutes the family resemblance (see, in particular,
Kustermans 2016; Frost and Lechner 2016a). IPT has revealed itself able
to progress while remaining adaptable as new challenges and empirical
constellations arise. In 2014, the first scenario was our preferred option, and
in this sense the developments observed are positive. However, one could
have envis- aged heterogeneity and, in particular, inter-disciplinarity
growing even stronger. Indeed, there is plausible evidence that tends
towards the logic of the second and third scenarios.
Some trends towards paradigmatisation have become identifiable; for
instance, Schatzki’s definition of practices as an organised nexus of
doings and sayings has become an almost universally adopted standard.
Adler and Pouliot’s (2011a) practice theoretical manifesto that blends, in
particular, approaches of Bourdieu and Wenger has become an
authoritative refer- ence point in the debate. By October 2017, their
article had been cited over 600 times, according to Google Scholar, which
implies that almost all of the publications in IR refer to it in one way or
another. It remains by far the most cited article, with the next most
popular by another author being Hopf 2010, with 257 citations. 7 While
the existence of a common refer- ence point for IPT is not problematic in
principle, there is a risk that the way the article frames practice theory
becomes taken for granted, with diversity therefore undermined.
174 C. BUEGER AND F. GADINGER

One of the core elements of Adler and Pouliot (2011a) was to outline
a framework. This proposal can be interpreted as a narrowing down and,
indeed, disciplining of IPT. As they rightly argue, this framework bares
similarities to our outline of commitments presented here in Chap. 2 (see
Adler and Pouliot 2015). It will remain a core conundrum that on the one
hand, IPT gains its strength from its open and pluralistic character, while
on the other it requires some sort of commonality to drive the project.
The solution to this conundrum lies in relational thinking, as IPT is con-
stituted by relations. While the language of commitments is preferable in
this regard, the Adler and Pouliot (2011a) article should be evaluated as
an anchoring point within IPT, and does not unambiguously point us to
paradigmatisation.
Other developments tend more clearly in that direction, however.
More recently, David McCourt (2017) published an article in which he
claimed that practice theories should be seen as an expression of what
he termed “new constructivism”. While he rightly pointed out that IPT
did not fall from the sky, and as we have frequently emphasised, develops
outlines and arguments from earlier constructivist work, subsuming IPT
under con- structivism, as he proposes, has the sole effect of mainstreaming
it (Bueger 2017). As IPT matures and the distinctions with other
perspectives become more clearly delineated, boundaries become
increasingly defined and reference texts box IPT into certain categories,
we are likely to see more such developments.
While IPT looks set to continue engendering thriving trading zones in
the near future, all three scenarios remain plausible as the field matures
and becomes richer. The first scenario continues to be our preferred one;
it reflects the spirit of this book and the direction in which we would like
to see IPT develop. This implies a further opening of the debate while
continuing to maintain existing connections, thereby strengthening the
conversation with other disciplines while clarifying what is specific about
the international; it is working towards greater internal consistencies of
approaches, while utilising their productive tensions; it is aiming at
philo- sophical sophistication whilst grounding analysis more deeply in
empirical material and real-world practice; it is describing international
practices in order to revisit and stimulate theorising. “Then”, as Reckwitz
(2002: 259) comments, “in future the hitherto loose network of
praxeological thinking might yield some interesting surprises.”
CONCLUSION: COMPLETING THE PRACTICE TURN
175

NOTES
1. As discussed and developed, in particular, by McCourt (2012), Drieschova
(2017), Franke and Weber (2011), Pratt (2016), or Schmidt (2014).
2. Lauren Wilcox’s (2017) invitation to build stronger links between practice
theory and gender studies is one signal in that direction.
3. Examples of practice theoretical research from science and technology
stud- ies, policy studies, or organisation studies document that other
audiences can be reached. Mol’s (2002) ANT-inspired study of a hospital,
for instance, is not only widely read in science and technology studies, but
also among practitioners of health. Indeed, the history of the community of
practice approach also provides an example; Wenger’s approach has
become widely used in actual organisational reforms, including in
international organisa- tions such as the United Nations. Yanow’s work on
category-making prac- tices and troubled taxonomies (race/ethnicity) in
bureaucracies concerning the inclusion and exclusion of immigrant groups
(Yanow et al. 2016) is another instance for practice driven research that
had a direct impact on a critical policy debate in the Netherlands and led to
a fundamental change of established categories.
4. Data as of 25.10.2017. Related Google Scholar queries, such as “practice
theory” + “international relations” produce similar outcomes (656).
5. See our short overview at the beginning of this chapter.
6. That IPT research was included in a recent interdisciplinary edited volume
on “Praxeological Political Analysis” (Jonas and Littig 2017) is, however, a
promising indicator for the developing exchange with sociology, social the-
ory, and philosophy.
7. Data as of 25.10.2017 referring to the period 2010–2017. Neumann 2002
is listed with 462 citations, while Pouliot 2008 with 436.
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 INDEX1

A Adler, Emanuel, 8, 17, 18, 27, 51,

Accountability 54–59, 65, 103, 110, 140,
and culture, 52 163, 172–174
dual nature of, 29
Adler-Nissen, Rebecca, 35, 36, 38,
and mutual accountability, 28, 53,
40–43, 104, 115, 124
114, 115
Agency
Action
agency and structure dualism,
Boltanski’s interpretation of, 90
87, 166, 167
and knowledge, 5, 21, 25, 112, and change, 5, 64, 100, 102, 126
146 Actor-Network Theory (ANT)
conceptualization of, 65–66, 102
actants in, 32, 81–83, 90,
material agency, 103, 119
139 concept of blackbox in,
in narrative approaches, 119
32, 82–84, 86
practice theory debates on, 4, 7
and conventional network theory,
and pragmatic sociology, 10, 119
83 criticism of, 85–87
American pragmatism, 87
and IR, 85, 86
Anthropology, 19, 144, 163, 168
and laboratories, 80, 82, 84, 85
Archer, Margaret, 164
and obligatory passage points,
82, 84, 86
research strategies of, 141
B
spokespersonship, 84, 86
Barnett, Michael, 25, 42, 71, 122, 144
translation in, 74, 82, 83, 85,
Berling, Trine Villumsen, 5, 8, 38–42,
88, 126
104, 124, 169

1
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2018

207
C. Bueger, F. Gadinger, International Practice
Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-
73350-0
208 INDEX

Blumer, Herbert,
critique of, 58, 59
135 Body, the
forms of interaction in, 54, 58
and ANT, 120
and IR, 51, 54–56, 58, 68n7
in International Relations, 48, 69,
and learning, 8, 54, 55, 140
116, 117, 120
and methodology, 115
Boltanski, Luc, 10, 30, 71, 74,
and power, 55, 58, 59
87–98, 101, 119, 121,
pragmatist concept of, 30, 102
125, 126, 139, 142, 173
and security communities,
Borghi, Vando, 95
51, 55–57
Boundary object, 54
three dimensions of, 53
Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 8, 15, 29, 30,
Constructivism, 7, 14, 15, 18, 19, 23,
35–44, 63, 67, 87–89, 96, 97,
24, 112, 116, 165, 171, 174
101, 113, 115, 117, 119,
Critique, 12n1, 52, 58, 87,
121–123, 126, 134, 136,
88, 91, 93–97, 113, 114,
139, 172, 173
121–123, 125–127,
Butler, Judith, 118, 164
133, 141, 142, 146
and power, 120–128
Czarniawska, Barbara, 70, 71, 81,
C
134, 144, 148, 151, 153, 155,
Callon, Michel, 9, 79, 81, 83, 84
157, 160, 161n11, 164
Capital
acquisition of cultural
and symbolic capital, 39
D
Bourdieu’s concept of, 8, 36,
Deleuze, Gilles, 80, 164
37, 39
Devetak, Richard, 76
centers of calculation, 84
Dewey, John, 10, 16, 68n2, 88
Latour’s concept of, 85
Diplomacy, 3, 5, 8, 40–42, 52,
Change
56, 57, 66, 75, 104, 106,
principle of indexicality, 103
144, 145, 168, 172
theory of, 44, 100–106, 110, 165
and narrative approaches, 74,
Chiapello, È ve, 87, 91, 94,
75 Discourse
95, 126, 142
and culture, 79
Classical pragmatism, 10, 136, 164
discourse analysis, 25, 45, 74,
in IR, 88
79, 138, 153
Commitments
Foucault’s understanding of,
of international practice
44–47, 49, 50
theory, 26–30
and narrative approaches, 127
Communities of practice (CPA), 59
Discourse theory, 7, 18, 19,
and agency, 55
24–25, 127
and ANT, 175n3
Doxa, 38, 167
constructivism; and CPA in IPT,
Bourdieu’s concept of, 8, 36, 37,
59 contingency, 102
39, 40, 101
INDEX
209

E Ethnomethodology, 80, 84, 88, 89,

 106, 114, 132, 138, 141, 164
I
European security, 38–41, 104
Indexicality, 103
European Union (EU), 40, 41, 49,
International Practice Theory (IPT)
50, 56, 57, 66, 79, 95, 127, 168
acronym of, 4, 12n1
and ANT, 82, 86, 120
and the body, 30, 69
F
and Bourdieu, 35, 87
Field
and communities of practice, 59, 167
Boltanski’s criticism
conceptual challenges of, 4, 99–128
of the concept of, 142
core commitments, 26, 27, 48
Bourdieu’s concept of, 8, 35–44,
fault line in, 101
88, 101, 139
and hierarchies, 124
Fluctuation, 102
and links with other IR theory
Focus groups, 133, 143, 151
approaches, 110
Foucault, Michel, 8, 22, 25,
long-term prospects of, 170
30, 35, 44–51, 80, 89,
and methodology, 11, 127
101, 102, 107, 119, 121,
new vocabulary of, 167, 173
122, 124, 126, 140
novelty of, 4, 11, 135
ontological baggage in, 128
and performativity, 7, 26, 118
G and pragmatic sociology, 87, 91, 92
Galison, Peter, 16 promises of, 5, 11, 166
Garfinkel, Harold, 88, 114, 164 rejection of natural scales,
Gherardi, Silvia, 105, 129n2, 164 54
Giddens, Anthony, 4, 15, 25, 67 research interests of, 5, 101, 106,
Governmentality, 8, 44–51, 124, 124, 127, 144, 170, 173
125 and sensitizing concepts, 135
as a trading zone, 12, 14, 17, 18,
128, 164–166, 170, 171, 174
H International practices, 6, 8–10, 17,
Habitus 30, 38, 54, 58, 64, 67, 75, 155,
Boltanski’s criticism 167, 173, 174
of the concept of, 88 See also Practices
Bourdieu’s concept of, 8, 35–39, International relations (IR), 1–2, 4–11,
43, 88, 119 13–31, 35, 36, 38–45, 47–49, 51,
Homo ludens, 71 52, 54–56, 58–60, 64–67, 68n7,
Homo narrans, 71 69, 70, 73, 77, 80, 81, 85, 86,
See also Storytelling 88, 89, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102, 106,
Homo oeconomicus, 20, 21 107, 110, 111, 113, 116, 117,
Homo sociologicus, 21, 23, 111 120, 122–124, 139, 144, 148,
Hopf, Ted, 37, 104, 105, 112, 149, 152, 153, 155, 157, 158,
129n3, 129n4, 167, 173 161n8, 161n10, 163–173
discipline of, 17, 19, 23–26,
107, 164, 171
210 INDEX

International Relations theory,

M
1, 2, 12, 17, 18, 25,
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 71, 114, 164
60, 110, 111, 134
Macro, 2, 91, 107–110,
Interviews
128, 164, 166
and experts, 150
Materiality
and groups, 133, 143
in ANT, 117, 118, 120
and observers, 147, 150
and ANT, and bodies, 116–120
and praxiography, 11, 149
and Bourdieusian approaches,
67, 117
and hierarchies, 31, 42
J
Metaphors, see Narrative approaches
Joas, Hans, 43, 44, 71, 90
Methodological individualism, 14, 20,
Justification, 10, 75, 77, 88,
24, 30, 36, 87, 102, 111
90–97, 114, 115, 121,
Methodology
126, 139, 141, 142, 167
and Bourdieu, 8, 134, 136
Boltanski’s concept of,
Methods
88, 114, 115
and artefacts, 133, 143–155
and conferences, 147
and ethnography, 132, 133,
K
138, 152, 156, 158,
Kemmis, Stephen, 129n2, 164
161n8, 165
Knorr Cetina, Karin, 13, 79, 109,
and focus groups, 133, 143, 151
129n2, 149, 160n2, 163, 164
and interviews, 133, 143, 147,
Knowledge production, 57, 143,
149–151, 157, 165
146, 169
and participant observation,
Latour’s study of, 80
133, 143–149, 153, 165
Kratochwil, Friedrich,
and text analysis, 136, 143, 151,
23, 25, 27, 33n2, 68n6,
153, 156, 157
88, 112, 136, 160n5
Micro
and flat ontology, 107, 109, 164
and macro, 2, 91, 106–108, 110,
L
128, 164, 166
Latour, Bruno, 9, 79–81,
Miettinen, Reijo, 13, 16, 107
83–85, 87, 89, 90, 97,
Mol, Annemarie, 18, 80–82, 120,
101, 102, 109, 119,
135, 138, 149, 175n3
121, 122, 125, 126, 158
Multiplicity, 7, 26–28, 88, 102,
Lave, Jean, 51–53, 145
115, 121, 143
Law, John, 9, 80–82, 84, 137
Learning
in communities of practice,
N
51, 53, 140
Narrative
legitimate peripheral participation,
and agency, 71, 119
52, 140
configuration of, 9, 70–74
INDEX
211
 and culture, 74
Normativity, 113–115, 142
and IR, 30, 69, 70, 94
justification; and mutual
and legitimacy, 71, 75, 76, 92
accountability, 115; and
and meaning, 77–79, 112
regularity, 113, 114; of
memory in, 70, 74, 78
practice, 114, 115, 142
and metaphors, 72, 79, 140–141
and order and change, 60, 165
and piracy, 75–76
and scale, 10, 128, 164
plots in, 72, 78
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
presentation of, 73, 102
(NATO), 40, 56, 57,
rhetorical devices in, 72, 79
104, 107, 168
social glue through, 70
speeches as, 75, 145
and translation, 74, 167
O
See also Homo
Orders of worth
narrans Narrative
Boltanski’s concept of, 88, 115
approaches
and justification, 88, 91, 92, 95
and basic research strategies,
and normativity, 95, 114
11, 139–143
Organisation studies, 8, 13, 70, 105,
core ideas of, 10, 71, 79
106, 146, 175n3
criticism of, 79
Ortner, Sherry, 15, 16
and discourse analysis, 74, 79, 138
and methodology, 159
in practice research, 70, 79
P
Neumann, Iver, 2, 3, 5, 6, 26, 31,
Paradigma, 11, 17, 133, 145
32, 48, 74, 75, 100, 118,
Paradigmatisation, 170, 173, 174
122–125, 144, 145, 149,
Participant observation
159, 161n10, 164, 175n7
and observing meetings,
Nicolini, David, 13, 38, 46, 50, 54,
147, 149
59, 60, 62, 63, 67, 103, 110,
and praxiography, 11, 143,
112, 114, 115, 118, 120, 132,
145, 165
136, 141, 146, 150, 164
Performativity, 9, 27, 118, 147,
Non-humans
156, 167
in ANT, 82, 87, 88, 118, 120
and ontology, 14
and practices, 82, 103, 119
Piracy, 52, 57, 75, 76
and pragmatic sociology,
Polyphony, 32, 71, 73–75
88 and shadowing, 149
Porter, Tony, 6, 68n5, 86, 141
Norm
Poststructuralism, 14, 22
and constructivism, 116, 165
Pouliot, Vincent, 5, 17, 18, 26,
and contestation, 88, 92, 112
27, 31, 35–37, 39, 40, 42,
and normativity, 10, 60, 62, 66,
55, 65, 87, 96, 103, 104,
110–116, 121, 124, 128,
110, 115, 119, 122, 124, 134,
164, 165
139, 144, 150, 151, 163, 168,
and practices, 10, 104, 111, 116, 164
172–174, 175n7
and values, 111
212 INDEX

Power
and overcoming micro/macro levels
Bourdieu’s concept of, 38, 39, 42,
of analysis, 2
43
and its relation with actor-network
and communities of practice, 8, 55,
theory, 9, 67, 79
121, 127
scale and size, 100
and critique, 100, 120–128
scenarios of, 12, 166, 170, 171
Foucault’s concept of, 126
and Wittgenstein, 16, 25, 60, 61,
and flat ontology, 110, 121
111, 112, 115, 160n5
and narratives, 70–74
Practice turn in social sciences, 2, 13,
pragmatic sociology’s concept of, 96
67, 131
symbolic power, 40–42
Practices, 2, 15, 36, 69, 99
Practical knowledge, 8, 16, 22, 25,
See also International practices
27, 36, 38, 41, 44, 112, 116,
Pragmatic sociology
145, 150, 153
and actants, 90, 118, 119, 139
Practical understanding, 9, 15, 61–64,
and action, 89
93, 111, 143
and agency, 90
non-human elements, 15
and Bourdieu, 97, 126
Practice research
and critical capacities, 96
basic research strategies of, 139–143
and critical moments, 88, 142
and interpretive methods, 168
and following the actors, 89
and interviews, 11, 40, 41, 133, 149
and IPT, 69, 91, 92
methodological considerations of,
and normativity, 114, 121
132, 159
and U.S. foreign policy, 92
and narratives, 70, 79
Pragmatic turn, 87
participant observation in,
Pragmatism, 10, 43, 71, 87,
11, 143–146, 165
88, 136, 164
and sensitizing concepts, 135, 136,
Praxeology of Bourdieu
138, 139, 154
criticism of, 43
shadowing, 11, 148
methodological consequences of,
and textual analysis, 142, 151, 153
15, 139
and theory, 4
Praxiography
Practice theory
and documentaries, 7, 31, 133,
and bodies, 2, 28, 116, 117,
142, 149
120, 136, 137, 163
and ethnography, 11, 132, 133,
and change, 10, 47, 55, 71, 79,
138, 161n8
81, 104, 167
interpreting results of, 155
and ethnography, 29, 129n5, 138
research techniques of, 11
and Heidegger, 16, 60, 62
writing, 11, 155–160, 165
intention of, 20, 29, 30, 107
and zooming in, zooming out, 141
and materiality, 28, 67, 116, 117,
Problematisation, 8, 31, 44–51,
119
139, 140
and normativity, 60, 62, 66, 100,
110, 113, 115
INDEX
213

R Rationalism, 15, 20
 and actor models, 24, 90
Spiegel, Gabrielle, 16, 100
Reckwitz, Andreas, 7, 14, 19–24,
Storytelling
28, 44, 45, 100, 104, 116,
and culture, 71, 72
129n1, 135, 136, 144, 152,
and meaning, 79
153, 164, 174
Sweetwood, Matt, 1–3, 157
Reflexivity, 38, 104, 105, 134,
156, 157, 164
Relationalism, 80, 81, 167
T
Rouse, Joseph, 13, 70, 84, 101,
Textual analysis, 142, 151, 153
104, 113, 114, 116, 156, 164
and praxiography, 153
Theorising, see Theory
Theory
S and concepts, 6, 22
Scale
and methods, 11, 16, 66
and flat ontology, 107, 164
and universalism, 137
and macro, 106, 128, 164
Thé venot, Laurent, 87–91, 97,
and micro, 164
114, 119
problem of, 107
Trading zone, 6, 7, 12, 14–19, 50,
Schatzki, Theodore, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16,
128, 164–166, 170, 171, 174
28, 30, 32, 35, 46, 47, 59–67,
of IPT, 12, 14, 18, 128,
87, 102–104, 108, 112, 116,
164, 166, 170, 171, 174
118, 121, 129n2, 155, 163, 173
Translation
Schmidt, Robert, 88, 117, 129n5,
in ANT, 74, 82, 83, 88, 126
131, 135, 136, 150, 164, 175n1
pragmatic sociology, 97
Science and technology studies, 9, 13,
19, 79, 107, 158, 175n3
Scripts, 69, 75, 76, 84
U
Securitization, integration of into
United Nations (UN), 10, 49, 93,
security community theory,
141–144, 147, 175n3
56 Semiotics, 14, 22, 80, 82, 119
and struggles for justification, 93
Shove, Elizabeth, 129n2, 164
Situated accomplishments, 15, 28, 112
Situations
V
and ANT, 82, 83
Von Savigny, Eike, 13, 163
Boltanski’s concept of, 90
and Bourdieu, 37
and narrative, 9, 139, 140
W
and normativity, 88, 111
Wagenaar, Hendrik, 13, 28, 72, 79, 157
of everyday life, 23, 78, 96
Walters, William, 6, 9, 32, 47, 48,
68n3, 85, 119, 126, 141, 149
Watson, Tony, 159
214 INDEX

Weber, Max, 22, 89, 90, 175n1

Wiener, Antje, 88, 112
Wenger, Etienne, 8, 35, 51–56, 58,
Wittgenstein, Ludwig,
59, 101, 102, 119, 136, 140,
19, 60–62, 111–113,
145, 173, 175n3
160n5, 164